


A Witch Hunt

by starkadder



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dreams, F/F, Mystery, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2016-09-17
Packaged: 2018-08-08 12:47:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7758448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkadder/pseuds/starkadder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Here was burned Carmilla Karnstein, convicted of witchcraft in 1698.</em>
</p><p>For burned-out investigative reporter Laura Hollis, a tiny village in the moors of the south-west of England is as far away from her normal life as possible. Nothing newsworthy has happened here since the seventeenth century.</p><p>But as her dreams are insistently invaded by an alluring but predatory presence and the villagers seem slightly too invested in a semi-legendary witch trial from three centuries ago, Laura finds herself drawn into a mystery of an entirely new sort. If only the locals could agree on what is actually meant to have happened in 1698...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Leave

Laura sat in the back of the taxi and watched the last bar of signal on her phone waver indecisively. The moors rose sharply ahead, their lower slopes covered in thick woods seeping upwards in the shelter of small clinging valleys. Heather was in bloom on the bare uplands, and even this far off in the orange light of evening the spray of purple was shocking. There were highlights of yellow too, smudged across the lower edges of the plateau by straggling gorse and picked out in sharp glances of sunlight.

“Not bad, eh?” said the driver. She grunted non-committally and continued to stare at the blinking bar in the top-right corner of the screen that made the difference between Danny not being able to call her and Danny choosing not to call her.

“Be good to get away from the rat race up in London?” he tried again. It had been a very long silence since picking her up from the station in town.

“Yeah.”

“What did you say you did?” She hadn't actually, but her disinclination to talk obviously hadn't penetrated far enough.

“Journalist,” she said. “Investigative reporting.”

He grinned in the mirror. “You are a long way from home, then. Nothing ever happens here worth putting in the news. What's bringing you to Burnt Tawton?”

“Had to get away.”

It wasn't true, not properly. It was fine. Or it would have been fine if everyone had just waited their _turn_. But she'd had to get those files _immediately_ and she'd had to do those interviews _now_ , and if Danny and Betty and her editor had just waited for her to finish they could have sorted it all out.

But after a quarrel with her best friend about work patterns, and a flaming row with her now surely ex-girlfriend about safety and responsibility, and a severe reprimand from her boss about the grey areas of legality, she was here. Indefinite leave was better than some of the possible alternatives anyway. She would still have a desk to go back to, and a flatmate as well. But probably not a girlfriend.

The weather was better here, at least. Back in London the heat of late summer was turning the streets into roasting ovens. No ventilation on the Underground, scarcely any air movement in the street and everywhere the push of hot, sweaty, angry people. An easy place to get short-tempered in - which was probably an significant part of the problem. But she had stepped off the train in Plymouth to a fresh wind coming off the sea, and even after the drive inland there was a relief to the breeze coming in through the crack in her window.

And not so many people to demand answers of her.

She thumbed through the last few days of messages on her phone. There were lots of received questions in the inbox from over the last two weeks, but not many replies sent. And then suddenly a great flurry from both sides – unanswered, or answered two or three times in increasing emotion. And at last, some pieces of finality from earlier that day when she stood on the platform of Paddington Station.

From her father. _See you before too long, poppet. Get well soon!_ Like she was ill or something. No doubt the unbearable hamper of favourite foods would be delivered to the pub she was staying in and she would be once again unable to tell him how much she hated feeling like an invalid.

From Betty. _Sort your head out, Miss Hollis. I love you, you silly fucking mess_. She could deal with that. Betty didn't mince words.

There wasn't anything at all from Danny. There hadn't been for several days, not since the tide of accusations and complaints (justified, unjustified and everything in between) exchanged three days before.

Whatever. She didn't need someone checking up on her every move, telling her to stop working when she was right in the middle of an important story. Didn't need someone who saw her own life as an obstacle to their relationship. (Was that fair on Danny? she wondered. No, came the reply, but think that and it will hurt less)

The driver did something energetic with the steering wheel and the car turned up a sharply angled road clinging to the rising slope. Laura steadied her bag with a rapid stamp on its corner and clung on as the car swung round one edge of the valley's mouth and then burst out onto a stone bridge opening into the village.

It stopped on the far side of Burnt Tawton, a journey of thirty seconds after slowly creeping in. Laura had time to see a small square of grass with flowerbeds, a dilapidated church with a surrounding skirt of weathered gravestones and, standing out shockingly in neat bright window-boxes and clean paint, the sign of the _Brinded Cat_.

* * *

The landlady extricated herself from behind the bar as soon as Laura heaved open the front door and dragged her unsteady luggage behind her. There were only two other people in the bar-room – one young man slumped over his beer on a stool and a vague shape of woman lurking in a dark corner with something in a highball. From somewhere in the low rafters a cat decided the new arrival was already boring it.

“I'm Perry,” the landlady introduced herself, wiping her hands on an apron of irreproachable neatness. She had a pleasant, nervous face with precisely pinned back curly hair. “Are you Miss Hollis?”

“Laura. Yes, I-”

“Oh, let me help you with those!” Perry hoisted the holdall over her shoulder, lifted the rucksack and somehow contrived to bustle despite it all.

The man at the bar scarcely moved as Perry lifted the bags over his shoulder and squeezed around him to a narrow door hiding between infrequently used bottles. The kitchen was ahead, but Perry turned almost a full circle and suddenly a thin stairway was revealed, steeply scrambling up to the first floor. All the while there was chatter, most of it one way.

“Did you have a nice journey, Laura? Oh, I am glad. The trains are so – well, you know. Such a horrible experience if anything goes wrong. And so rarely on time! So let's see, it's four weeks is it? Yes, I know I double-checked on the phone, but it's rather unusual for us, and it never hurts to check again. We normally get walkers in for the one night only, or the odd couple for a week-”

She seemed able to keep going with only minimal involvement from Laura.

“Ah! Here we are. I've given the cupboards a good scour out, I can't believe there was so much dust in _my_ pub-”

The _Brinded Cat_ , it turned out, had only one guest room but it was larger than Laura expected. A white-painted iron bedstead whose springs sang protests at the sudden weight of her bag, a dressing-table, a small bathroom. Her little square window opened out onto the street, already beginning to look less warm as the evening light dulled.

“So it's bed, breakfast and dinner all provided and I can do you a packed lunch – except if you like on Sundays when I do a roast for the customers and you'll get that included, so-”

And so on. Laura didn't want to be rude, especially with the same landlady for a month, but she couldn't muster up the effort to provide anything more than a few words at a time. 

The bar-room had only one other customer when she clambered down the uneven stairs after performing a desultory attempt at unpacking. Perry gave her a glass of white wine (“I've got to go deal with the oven in a moment, so just pour yourself more if you want. Till's over there, you need to thump it on the side to open the drawer”) and Laura found the now vacant dark corner to brood in.

No messages - but then no signal. Hardly unexpected.

“You need to stand on the bridge and hold it up.” It was the other customer, a young man sitting on a stool at the bar. He had dirty jeans and dirtier hands. “To get signal.”

“Right.” She put her phone down and tried to inspect the prints on the walls. There appeared to be two types: those bought in the last few years, which were tidy pictures of pleasant scenes, and those dating back longer, which suggested a taste for barren trees and blasted heaths in the buyer. Perry and her predecessor, Laura presumed.

“Of course,” he smirked, “ _you_ might need a box to stand on, little lady.”

Oh, good. They had creepy bastards in the country too. The man stood up, drained his pint and sauntered over. Smarmy smile, check.

“Theo,” he said. “I do the grounds up at the manor.” He extended a hand, which she ignored.

Instead she tried to plot the course that would lead to this conversation being over. “Do you?” sounded non-committal enough, although it had the disadvantage of being a question.

“I could... show you around.” He did something with his arms that was probably meant to show of his biceps without drawing attention to the fact that he was showing them off. "Since you're a city girl." 

She picked her glass up and studied the slightly off wine while pointedly ignoring him for as long as seemed safe. “I think I'll be fine, thanks.”

“Aw, don't be like that. Not polite to shoot a guy down that way. People might think you're a dy-”

“Fuck off.” She stamped her wine glass back on the table and pushed past him out the door and onto the street, before cursing her idiocy. She was staying _at_ the pub. She should have gone back to her room. And now that awful man was between her and her bed. Kicking against the loose gravel on the road, she marched off to at least work some of the anger out her system.

The road was not clean. Gravel from front drives and the car park of the _Brinded Cat_ mixed with loose straw, mud and occasionally sheep droppings was the ubiquitous litter. She kicked the gravel moodily as she paced through the village, but avoided the rest. It was quiet. The sun was going down and the golden tones were being replaced with a paler twilight, still easy to see by but not so welcoming.

The main road seemed to cover most of Burnt Tawton. Behind her, at the pub end, it disappeared up into the hills. In front of her the bridge back to Plymouth and the lowlands was already close by. To left and right were huddled houses, with side roads leading to the more remote buildings. There was a small shop with a postbox set into the side, what looked to be a tearoom, and some kind of hardware store. On the other side of the road, the church crumbled slowly in its diminutive graveyard. There was a noticeboard by the gate bearing one poster – _Burnt Tawton Midsummer Fair. 21st June_. Nothing had apparently occurred in the two months since to require the sign to be replaced.

Just a little on from the church was a square patch of grass. Laura wandered over and walked the bounds. There was a pair of war memorial stones set into one side, flush against the surrounding path. She noted a Corporal S. Perry among the dead of the Great War. Several German names also caught her eye – unusual for such a small place. Private H. Kirsch. Captain W.T.L. Vordenberg. She felt unexpectedly sorry for them that they only got initials in death.

There was another stone on the opposite side of the green as well, this time not flat but standing upright by about two feet. It was weathered to a formless nub. A bronze plaque was affixed to the base of the stone with small lettering, harder to read in the failing light than the large clear letters of the war dead. Laura knelt and squinted, but had to retrieve her phone to shine a light on the letters before it was legible.

_Here was burned Carmilla Karnstein, convicted of witchcraft in 1698._

“Here was burned Carmilla Karnstein,” echoed a man's voice from the other side of the patch of grass, “convicted of witchcraft in 1698.” 

Laura stood up quickly. The man – there was only one other person in this space – stood a dozen yards away, leaning the left of his body gently on a thin stick. He was old and balding, but well-dressed and looking at her keenly.

“Did I startle you?” he asked. “My apologies, young lady. And welcome to my village.” He said this grandly, and waved a hand casually at the ancient houses. “I hope Perry is keeping you well?”

“Your village?” Laura asked. She glanced around at the road and the gaps between houses. Never could be too careful, even with old men. _Especially_ with old men. “And how do you know who I am?”

“I don't,” he shrugged, “but I know everyone who lives here and you are not one of them. So then I know you are a visitor. Cornelius Vordenberg, at your service. I live in the old manor, back beyond the inn.” He came closer and stuck out his right hand. She shook it tentatively.

“Laura,” she said. After a moments silence and for want of anything better to say, she asked, “you know the plaque, then?”

“Oh yes. My grandfather had it inscribed, you know. A bit of an amateur historian, he thought the memory should be preserved.” He tapped the stub of rock familiarly with the base of his stick. “This is where it happened, or so he said. This very stone. They call it the Firestone. The old Baron Vordenberg – my ancestor – gathered the village together and they enacted the sentence.”

“Your ancestor?” Laura asked. There had been a Vordenberg on the war memorial as well, she remembered.

“Ah, yes. We Vordenbergs came to England in the seventeenth century. The great war against the Ottoman Empire you know, it devastated Styria. People fled, mostly to France. But my several times great-grandfather brought the family here shortly before our old home was destroyed. In, hmm, 1682.”

“And he burned the witch?”

“Quite so, quite so. She was infamous as a betrayer - and a ravager of virtue. The story says that she prowled around the moors at night in a monstrous form and that cattle were found eviscerated the next day. And the milk turned sour and things went missing. But worst of all was the girl. There was a girl in the village – naïve, provincial girl – whom Carmilla entranced. Wove her webs around her! And then she was found to have been induced to participate in these... rites.” Vordenberg paused and his tongue anxiously poked the corners of his mouth. He seemed a little agitated.

Laura felt a stab of fellow-feeling for the witch.

“Well, the girl disappeared one day and old Vordenberg led a party out to hunt for her. They didn't discover the poor creature, but came upon Carmilla in a clearing – naked and with blood under her nails. So. They bound her to the Firestone and burned her alive.” 

Laura shuddered. He had said it in such a matter-of-fact way. “A trial?” she asked.

“No trial, young lady. No need. Not when guilt was written on her face for all to see.” He seemed slightly proud.

Laura had nothing to say to this. She turned her gaze down on the plaque and contemplated the words. How old had Carmilla been?

“Well. That is our local legend. Such a thing to remember. Good night, young lady,” Vordenberg said, with something approaching a bow. “I do hope you enjoy your stay here.” And he withdrew, fading back into the falling dark.

The church bell tolled suddenly and Laura registered with surprise that it was only nine o'clock. Around her the small square had been left deserted by the departure of the old man and there was no sound even of footsteps. Back home the evening would be only beginning. Crowds would be appearing on the street in their high heels and coiffed hair, but here there was only a watching cat curled up on one side of the bridge.

She drifted back to the inn. Small windows glowed in the cracks between curtains and even though the dark had not yet truly closed in the first stars were rising into life above her. No great orange-yellow furnace of the city night met her uplifted face, only the looming presence of the moors at the end of every view.

There was no Theo in the bar-room, and vague shufflings from underfoot suggested Perry was down in the cellars. She took the stairs slowly.

Her room was more comfortable after a walk than it had seemed earlier. She drew her own curtains tightly and pulled all the pillows from the scattered positions together in a heap for her head. In the unaccustomed silence every slight clink of the bedsprings was deafening and carefully not moving she sank down into sleep.

The dream was of footsteps on dry ground. Curls of heather, sharp twigs and loose tussocks of bladed grass scratched her ankles and shot pain into the soles of her feet. But she staggered on, unwilling to lose the slightest moment in her pursuit of the one ahead. There were scrubby stunted trees here and there over this hot windswept landscape and she turned her face down to the ground to avoid their grasping fingers but knew without looking that the other was not far ahead.

“Come follow,” she whispered to herself and knew in the instantaneous way knowledge arrives in dreams that she was repeating instructions given to her by another. “Come follow. Come with me a-hunting.”


	2. Legend

“Good morning, Laura! Breakfast!”

The curtains were flung open and the white sunlight of a bright summer morning assaulted her eyes. There was bustling and clinking and then a pot of tea and a tray of food and behind it-

“-Perry? What?”

“Breakfast! I let you lie in a bit, I know you must be tired after all your travelling. Now, I didn't think to ask what you might like last night, so there's a bit of everything. Is it tea first thing, or do you prefer coffee?”

Laura shuffled her way up and after a gargantuan effort forced her eyelids to open for more than a half-second. “No, tea's fine...” she managed. Perry was already putting a stand across her knees and placing the tray carefully on top. She wore a neat duck-egg blue apron, a lace band in her hair, and the joyous expression of somebody who got up early and wants you to be enjoying the morning as much as she is.

After the first draught of tea, staying awake seemed less agonising and eating more plausible. Toast with marmalade, boiled eggs, croissants, fresh fruit – Perry probably didn't approve of fry-ups, but given that Laura's normal breakfast consisted of ginger biscuits eaten hurriedly at her desk after rushing into work, she had no complaints. Four weeks compulsory leave suddenly didn't sound like such a bad idea.

She chewed over last night's encounters. Theo was a dick and would have to be avoided – end of story. Vordenberg was potentially interesting, though possibly not at great length or too frequently. Although who knows – what else would she _do_ in a village where entertainment consisted of one pub, a fête every June, and where mobile signal was obtained by standing very tall on the only bridge out to civilisation? The lack of activity which had been so inviting a few days before suddenly became a problem very close at hand.

“Perry?” She stuck her head round the door of the kitchen on her way downstairs. “Is there somewhere I can find out about the area? Like, a library or a bookshop with guidebooks or something?”

Perry looked round from her task of lining up empty jam jars next to little wax seals. “Oh, you want the museum. Down the other end, on the right. Everything's there.”

The 'other end on the right' was more or less where the stone set into the green was. Laura saw the morning sunlight glint on the brass plaque as she skirted the grass. Huddling on an inset to the right before the stream bank plunged down was a grey stone building a little larger than the surrounding houses and a sign outside saying 'Museum' in peeling black letters on splintery wood. A second sign said 'Tourist Information'. Laura heaved open the door.

Inside was a plain room upholstered partly in old-fashioned oak furniture but mostly in dust. There was a scattering of chairs around the sides, an array of shelves at the far end, and before them a desk piled high with books behind which a man was deeply engrossed in a small volume.

Laura coughed, and when this produced no response, ventured to speak.

“I'm not disturbing you, am I?”

This produced a jump, an expression of shock, and a lot of fussing with his hands.

“Oh! No, no – come in.” The man scrambled to his feet and steadied the tottering books disturbed by his movement. He had a neat dark beard and hair around very pale grey eyes.

“The sign outside said 'museum'?” She said hesitantly.

“Yes. Indeed – it's in here.” He gestured vaguely to one side. “Over there, behind the door with the stain you don't want to know about. It's all a bit of a mess in here, I'm afraid: there aren't exactly a lot of public services in Burnt Tawton so there'll all jumbled together. Ahem! Welcome to the combined village hall, parish archives, lending library, local museum and tourist information.” He performed a sort of bow and Laura found herself responding in kind.

“Laura Hollis,” she introduced herself. The journalism habits kicked in and she started assembling facts: no ring, but small framed photograph on desk – a red-haired person of indeterminate gender if any. Accent: Received Pronunciation. Tie not expensive but not cheap either, well tied: used to wearing it. Cufflinks-- 

She reminded herself she was on holiday and tried to smile winsomely rather than narrow her eyes professionally. 

“Perry's new one, aren't you? Oh, I'm sure everyone's heard by now,” he added to her expression, “news gets around. I'm JP Armitage – I keep this place going. Insofar as it does go, anyway. You were interested in the museum? I can show you around.”

“Oh, I wouldn't want to disturb your work-”

“My reading, rather. Agatha Christie's _The Pale Horse_.” He fished the copy out of its mound of other books and flourished it. “Duties are rather light here – I dust the museum, shelve whichever book was borrowed this month, restock the leaflets, file the official statistics four times a year and renew people's fishing licences. Once I had to fill in three forms in a day. I'm still recovering.”

His manner was polite, slightly anxious, and very much disarming. Laura allowed him to steer her across the dusty tiled floor to a wooden door with the sign 'Museum' on a wooden plaque.

It turned out to be three interconnected rooms with almost, but not entirely, unlabelled cabinets and cases.

JP led her round a winding path between the displays and tried to make up for the lack of written explanation. They were at least roughly chronological. In one room flint axes and arrowheads mixed with polished bone fragments; bronze trinkets and coloured stone beads; the detritus of Roman farms. In another were indistinguishable shapes of preserved leather and pictures of vague shapes in fields – the Middle Ages. Finally there was a room dominated by a incomprehensible pieces of mining equipment.

Not paying especially close attention to JP's explanation of the tin industry – Laura had enjoyed the tour so far, but there was only a limited amount of mining terminology she could cope with – she drifted over to a side cabinet where a half-dozen books lay opened at particular pages and the word 'witch' jumped out at Laura from several of them at once. 

“The charming village legend,” muttered Laura after studying some of the more fiery illustrations. “Does everyone in these parts greet visitors with a delightful story of judicial murders past, by the way?”

JP looked sidelong at her. “Have you already been talked at by Vordenberg, by any chance?”

Laura smiled at the phrasing. “You could say that. Told me about his heroic ancestor and the burning of Carmilla Karnstein, witch and hinted debaucher of ladies.” JP laughed.

“Yes, he does rather go on. A family trait apparently. His grandfather put up the plaque on the Firestone, and it was yet another Vordenberg – some time in the century before last – who wrote down that whole preposterous story.”

“It's not true?”

“Hmm. Well, certainly not all of it. Let's see-” He jiggled with the door of the large shelved cabinet until it opened and retrieved one open book from the centre of the display. The cover was blue cloth and the frontispiece read, _A History of Burnt Tawton and the Surrounding Districts by Albert Vordenberg. Published by John Murray, 1858._

“This is the first written account that matches old Vordie's little tale,” he said as he opened it to the marked page, “Carmilla Karnstein came to the village from outside, 'lured a young lady of nineteen summers from her parents' guiding hands' – if you know what I mean,” here JP made a good attempt at waggling his eyebrows conspiratorially, “became suspected of witchcraft and was burned to death on a pyre constructed around a stone in the village green which thereafter became known as the Firestone. Everyone knows the story.” 

He clamped the volume shut and started counting on his fingers. “Problem number one: everyone knows witches were burned at the stake. Well on the Continent, yes. And in Scotland. But England preferred to hang them – not that many people remember that little detail. It makes for less dramatic woodcuts, I suppose.

“Problem number two: Albert Vordenberg claims the nineteen year-old village girl led astray by Karnstein disappeared on the very day of the burning. But you can consult the parish records and every girl born in the preceding twenty years in this village is also recorded as having married in St Catherine's – and all of them after 1698.

“Problem number three: The Firestone was already called the Firestone in a document of 1565, because it stands where the old bakery once stood – and is in fact the worn-down stub of the pillar supporting the brick oven.

“Conclusion: Albert Vordenberg didn't know what he was talking about – or else he preferred a little local colour, something that gave his ancestry a certain local cachet. The great witch-hunter, the great defender!” JP's diction was too polite to be truly harsh and he softened the criticism with a smile, but Laura could hear the disdain for making up history.

“There is a second story. Much more reliable, if you want my opinion.” He put the Vordenberg book back in its place and retrieved a second. “Thomas Derby, 1727. _Antiquities and Legends of the Moors._

_“And it is further said among the villagers of Burnt Tawton that thirty years ago, more or less, a witch haunted the area. She attracted the attention of one Carmilla Karnstein, the only daughter of Austrian immigrants (for there are three or four families in this village whose origins are in those who fled Styria with the coming of the Great Turk in 1682, refugees being inclined to keep to each others' company), and the two of them were often seen wandering the moors at all hours. When old Mr Karnstein did make protest of this, the two young ladies vanished one night. It was generally agreed even today, in the superstitious manner of country folk, that all sheep who died on the moor were taken by the witch in revenge.”_

“And that's more reliable?” Laura asked.

JP shrugged. “Maybe. Less sensationalist, closer to the time.” He returned the second book to its home and tapped out a distracted rhythm on one of the glass panes. “Difficult to know anything real about the past sometimes. History's what people remember, and you know how reliable people can be.”

Laura pushed down the insistent recollections of the last week and how her own perfectly reasonable actions had come back to her dressed up in accusations and disappointment. Not to think about now. “Sounds to me like they eloped,” she said instead.

“I believe it was not unheard of.” JP pointed at a door at the other end of the room. “If you're really interested, there's not a bad collection of books on witchcraft in the library. And all the murder mysteries I can acquire, of course.”

* * *

Perry was in the kitchen when Laura returned to the inn. A production line of bread rolls was under way. She sat on the table and – assuring herself that this was for socialising purposes and not in any way assessing potential sources - asked her landlady about the other inhabitants of the village. Were there many regulars at the pub?

“Regulars? Well, I suppose pretty much all the village come here at some time but yes, there's a few who turn up most days. Let's see.” Perry thumped down the lump of dough and set it aside before pulling the next piece towards her. 

“JP up at the museum comes in fairly often, but then he's an old friend of mine so he'll more often turn up when the pub's closed. Theo from the estate drinks here all the time,” Laura's heart sank, “unpleasant person he is. The other labourer Kirsch – big sweet lump of a man – as well.”

“There's also Mattie.” She pursed her lips. “Matska Belmonde. Fancy lady, some business big-shot. Heaven knows what she's doing here, I can't stand her. She waltzes in all polished and looks at you like-” Perry broke off from her increasingly rapid delivery and blushed. Laura's internal journalist made a few notes about her landlady's tastes.

“It's all very strange with her. She arrived here maybe a year ago – took the house by Stony Brook. She must have spent a fortune doing it up, and putting in all the modern comforts. Heaven knows what she gets up to. JP thinks she's lying low, that's she's got some history with unsavoury characters.”

“People talk a lot, then?” Laura asked. Gossip was meat and drink to a journalist, even one on – she had to remind herself – mandatory leave.

“Oh heavens, yes. Mattie's been the main object of gossip since she arrived. Before that, JP was under scrutiny because of his partner in Plymouth. Such a lot of nonsense, but there's nothing else to make a fuss about. Now and again a sheep goes missing and it's the topic of conversation for a week.”

“Taken by the witch?” Laura joked, remembering JP's second book, but Perry's face tightened.

“Superstitious nonsense!” she snapped, and threw the moulded dough onto its tray with rather more force than intended. It splatted a bit into a flat oval. Tutting, she retrieved it and began reshaping the formless lump.

“Well yes, I suppose so,” said Laura in a conciliatory tone. “I was just hearing about the history.”

“Lot of rubbish,” Perry snorted. The bread achieved its proper shape and this seemed to cheer her because she continued. “Vordenberg will just go on and on about it. His ridiculous story! All made up, of course.”

JP was a friend of Perry's, Laura recalled.

“You say _superstition_ ,” she pressed. “Do people actually think there's some truth in it?”

“Mostly? No, I don't think so. Oh, most people will say that the Karnstein witch was a real person, but not the actual witchcraft. It was a power struggle between families, or mass hysteria, or misogyny or something. But teenagers get interested and end up doing stupid things.” Perry brushed her floury hands off on her apron and stared off into the distance. “Last summer we had to get the air ambulance in to lift Lily Hotchkiss off of Carn's Cairn. She'd got convinced there was something 'mystical' about it and she went ghost-hunting under the full moon. Broke her leg in three places.”

She turned the oven on and checked the clock for when the rolls would be ready to go in. Laura waited to see if there was something else for her to say. It took her a while, washing her hands and hanging up her apron first.

“It's not good to get sucked into that kind of world. Even if it's imaginary. It's just... why can't you be normal? Be normal.”

Laura wasn't sure whether Perry was addressing her or somebody else.

* * *

Laura slept deeply again that night, finding herself more comfortable now that the bed was more familiar.

There were dry twigs under her feet again in the dream, and the moor thrummed with the lazy drone of bees seeking amongst the willowherb. Quickly she stepped forward, her strides long and sure-footed, leaping over tangles and pitted depressions. Vaguely she registered the lack of pain, her subconscious noting that this wasn't how it had felt last night when the sharp debris had cut and speared her tender soles. She was closer behind the one she pursued and, when her gaze rose from the ground to loom further ahead, she could see the whipping black hair and pale limbs running in front of her.

They were high up on on the plateau of the moors, wide open sky above her and only a gentle rise to a scattering of boulders and stunted trees that marked the local summit. All at once she found herself happy, deliriously happy. The lingering consciousness of all that she'd left behind in London trickled away, sinking into the parched soil.

It was freedom. She laughed, and it came out as a wild shriek of joy. Tiny birds shot skywards from their hiding places in the tangled brown shrubs, and she followed their whirling flight against the shocking blue of the sky. 

Plunging forward, she caught up with her companion, and the two of them dropped laughing into the vegetation to loll carelessly in the warm sunshine.

“Come away with me,” her companion said. Laura sighed and rolled a little closer till the back of her head rocked up against the girl's arm. "Don't you want to get away? From all the overbearing fathers and jealous lovers and obsessive friends? We could go, just you and me."

“Where to?” she said. Her voice was thin and quiet. “Where could we go?”

“Anywhere. All the way across the moors. Out to Cornwall. Across the sea. Ireland. France.”

“Don't be silly.” She smiled but shook her head. “How could we, Carm? How could we live? Wherever we go we'll be two runaway girls. No work, no history, nothing to build a life on.”

The other girl smiled, slowly and maddeningly confidently. “No we won't. It will all be different, you'll see.”

“When will I see? Tell me!” Laura rose up and looked intently into her pale face, but received only a shake of the head.

“Not yet. I said you'll see. I'll show you – but not yet. The moon's not right yet.”

“What's the moon got to do with anything?” She lifted herself up on her elbow and squinted intently at the calm and smiling face of her companion.

“Oh, hush you. Too many questions.” She reached out and flicked Laura's nose.

“Humph!” Laura lay back and sulked, only half-seriously. For a moment there was silence apart from the background noise of insects and birds. A pair of bobbing finches wove a pattern against the blue sky filling her vision. The light wavered and for a moment she seemed to be lying in a soft bed with morning sunlight pouring in through the windows onto her face, but just as she began to squint in the brightness a shadow threw itself over her.

She raised her hand to trace fingers down the girl's face. The sharp eyebrows, the smooth inevitable curve of her jaw. He hair was loose, stray ends teasing Laura's skin and waving curtains around her vision.

Those lips could not be unkissed for long. Always the softness was unexpected, and every time her metaphorical sharp tongue turned out to be quite the opposite. Laura sighed into it.

Fine bones in her shoulders. The intricate joinings of shoulder blades and clavicles, all laced through with the tight strings of tendons. She brushed away the blouse.

Laura's world shrunk to a hollow in the heather whose roof was a dark-haired woman. Off came her own clothes, the skirt thrown wide to the wind that could not trouble her in their shelter. A kiss with tongue and teeth in it, on her lips, nestling into the crook of her neck.

And hands everywhere, and lips everywhere – and for one shuddering moment she sat halfway up, the scene blinking before her eyes as as she surfaced for an instant into her own bed. But hands  
pushed her down again and melted her through.

Her lover spread her wide and drew cries from her mouth. Laura's fingers tangled into that dark hair and the last vestiges of restraint disappeared as each flick of the tongue drove forth incoherencies of affirmation and pleading, more babbling than speech. 

But one word pushed itself out of her mouth decisively. Shuddering, breathing harshly, rolling in waves between her dream of heather and her bed in the inn, Laura cried out the name that was forcing its way out of her depths into her consciousness.

“Carmilla!”


	3. Layers

Her walking boots were stiff and the old mud spatters clinging to them had spent so long without being properly cleaned off that they had bonded to the fabric with an indelible closeness. Nonetheless, with great energy she had managed to beat the worst of the layers off on the outside of her window sill before she showed her face downstairs. Perry had barely frowned at them at all.

The way up from the village to the moors passed through a long thin corridor of woodland shadowing the road on both sides and concealing, somewhere to her left, the rocky stream that eventually ran through the village. She could hear the rushing of the current but no hint of the watercourse could be seen through the undergrowth. The map, neat and cleanly-folded and with the newsagent’s price tag still on, named the track Thursleat Way and recorded that the turn-off to Tawton Manor was nearby on the right. 

It was not quite steep enough to demand rests on the ascent, but Laura found she had to breath heavily and slow her pace from the brisk march she had set out from the inn at. But then there was no need to hurry now, not for weeks. Somewhere up ahead the urgent shadow of a pheasant unwilling to remain on the road dashed across her path.

She had planned this walk the evening before, realising that she might as well explore the one reason people came to visit Burnt Tawton – but today she had a new and particular curiosity to explore the moors. Awaking that morning, it had taken a few minutes to absorb the previous night's dream. First there had been the moments of lying unthinking in the bright sunlight and listening to the faint clinkings from the kitchen on the ground floor. Then it had all come back – the setting, the joy of the wide sky and open landscape, the girl. The sex, especially.

The name of Carmilla had only made itself present to her consciousness after a few minutes of contented drifting.

Perhaps it was a good thing that she’d found herself in a village with a minor fixation, she speculated. Instead of the nights she’d experienced recently – stress, dream arguments, trying to find things forever lost and inaccessible – she’d had a lovely romp on the heath with an imaginary companion as beautiful as her subconscious could manage to produce, and all because the locals had spun her stories about Carmilla the alluringly dangerous witch.

Up ahead of her the tunnel formed by the overhanging trees had a light at the end. It flickered, and then the flickering resolved itself into a silhouetted figure coming the other way. 

As the walker came closer, the uncertain figure resolved itself into a woman with olive skin and wavy black hair. She wore tough boots, shorts and a sleeveless top with an image of an arrow and the slogan 'Summer Society Endurance Trek 2015 – Sutherland'. Laura recognised the outline of the serious hiker.

“Morning,” Laura greeted her with a smile, just because the morning was so pleasant. 

The woman nodded sharply, then paused and stopped her rapid striding. “Morning. Burnt Tawton down there?” She held up the map in her hand, significantly more weathered than Laura’s. “I've had three wrong turns this morning already, this place is hidden even for Dartmoor.”

Laura nodded agreement, and wondered how early you had to get up to make three wrong turns by ten o’clock in the morning. Didn’t bear thinking about.

“I arrived the day before yesterday,” she told the stranger with a smile. “In the evening. And before I’d even gone to bed I’d been called ‘city girl’, advised that there was no phone signal, and treated to a tale of witchcraft!” She’d said it as a conversational nothing, a joke about the isolation of the place, but the woman’s eyes darkened at the mention of witchcraft.

“I hear they burned one here,” she said. “And now it’s a quaint story to tell tourists.”

Laura rapidly bit down on offering any opinions of her own. She recognised the signs of forthcoming opinions.

“I was up in Pendle last Easter,” the woman went on. “Went off on a detour from the Pennine trail. They've turned their old trials into a tourist industry. Themed buses and gift shops. Bunch of women got hanged three hundred years ago and now it's a business opportunity.”

“Doesn't seem to be much profiting going on here,” Laura reassured her. “A display in the museum is everything I've seen.”

The woman nodded. “They'll say it was anything,” she said. “Religious unrest, social upheaval, ancient cults. But it always ends with some girl being dragged out because the men don't like her. Maybe she's too confident in business, or too bold in gatherings, or she likes to pick her partners rather than be picked. They'll burn her to stop it, and any excuse will do.” She slapped her map against her thigh. “But anyway. Many miles to do before lunch.” And without a further goodbye she resumed her march down the hill and Laura, pensive, took the last few dozen steps to the edge of the shadowed woods and onto the heath.

The sun broke out around her as she scrambled out of the wood and onto the plateau of the moor. Around her the landscape spread itself around, open and expansive, wide out to the horizon. Getting further up, clear of the trees, and the lowlands to the south were laid at her feet all the way to the sea, a hazy but undisturbed blue in the middle distance. 

The land up here rolled indefinitely for the most part, but there were higher points a few miles away and nearby a local rise. The path she followed led around it. Somewhere ahead of her a hobby turned its hovering into a swooping dive as it saw something on the ground. 

Carn's Cairn, said the map. It turned out not be a cairn as such. Rather than a small heap of stones serving as a marker it was a low rise in the ground littered with loose scree and boulders. A scattering of small wind-contorted trees grew here, protected by the difficult ground from the depredations of sheep and deer. 

A trickle of last night's dream came back to her. There had been something like this – hadn't there? She tried to fix the memories down, but her consciousness slid off the attempt and presented her instead with a beautiful dark-haired woman working her way down her exposed body.

But it had been on the moor. And they had been running towards something rocky and with trees. But then all moors looked much the same - at least to her. So it was hardly surprising that she could dream up a barren expanse of heather and peat which resembled remarkably another barren expanse of heather and peat. No points for serendipity there.

The trees were silver birches, their bright green leaves quivering wildly in the wind and draping a constantly-moving curtain over the boulder field as Laura picked through it. As she wandered among the jagged rocks and picked her way aimlessly over gnarly stemmed bushes, she became very slowly conscious that she was expecting something. She couldn't quite bring up to the light what it was she thought she would find, but the sense was there of something well-known just about to turn a corner. 

This place of strewn rock and tree was not large, and there was an obvious summit, an earth mound surmounted by a birch much taller than the others whose lower trunk was almost submerged beneath a heaped pile of stones. She stumbled towards it, not knowing why it was important she stand beneath it. 

There, in the weathered face of a boulder under the highest tree was a pair of carved letters. More than that. Laura leaned closer and brushed aside the patina of dirt and dust.

_L + C_ , it read, all surrounded by a heart shape.

Laura realised that she was tired and it wouldn't stop.

* * *

She was sitting with Carmilla on a pile of boulders and watching the light play through the shivering birch leaves. She had taken her shoes off and hiked her long skirt up and was enjoying the warm roughness of the rock under her feet and the sun on her bare legs. Carmilla's feet nudged hers and she smiled.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Carmilla said in her low drawl of a voice.

“It's so empty up here,” Laura murmured. “Nobody but us. Just you, me and Carn's Cairn.” She waved an arm at the landscape around them. From the cairn they could see the moor for miles around when not blocked by a birch trunk.

“ _Karnstein's_ Cairn,” corrected Carmilla. “It does belong to my father, remember?”

“Thought there must be a reason why you like it, oh lady of the manor.” Laura gave her a gentle headbut.

Carmilla smiled wolfishly. “Actually I like it here because you let yourself scream properly when I fuck you with nobody around,” she said, and her smile only grew wider with Laura's blush. “Although today I have something else to show you first.” She rocked herself up into a sitting position and tipped herself over to where her bag was waiting.

“A present?” Laura asked hopefully.

“Not quite...”

“Cake? Biscuits? Lemonade?”

“No...” Carmilla pulled out a roll of paper and began peeling off the layers.

“Maybe it's... oh my God what is _that_?” she recoiled from the black and bloody thing that lay on the open paper.

Carmilla picked it up by one corner and swung it around, enjoying the look of horror on Laura's face. “It's a bat wing. I caught it in the woods.”

“You – _caught_ – a bat? How did you catch a bat?”

“Something else I'll show you when the time is right. But today – hold please.” She thrust the black leathery thing at Laura who held it gingerly by one of the extended fingers. The joints wobbled obscenely. Carmilla pulled more bundled things out of her bag and laid them on the rock. She spread her arms to encompass them and said, “There are two things you can do with a bat wing and we're going to do the other one.”

Laura sighed. “If you say so. Why aren't we doing the first thing, if there's any point to me asking?”

“Because there aren't any vampires here.” Carmilla said this as if it were obvious and Laura studied her face for any hint of joking. There was none.

“Right, of course. What magic have you got up your sleeve today, then?” 

“You're mocking me,” said Carmilla. “You may think it's funny, but you'll stop laughing eventually.” Laura saw that she was upset.

“I'm sorry Carm, I don't mean to.” She leaned forward and planted a gentle kiss on Carmilla's cheek, and then a second on her jaw. “I just don't understand where you get all this stuff from.”

“You will. Now, watch.” And Laura watched as Carmilla took the bat wing from her fingers and laid it neatly on a stone. Then she unwrapped a spool of red thread and a needle from another package, and made a hole in both ends of the wing. She tied the thread neatly through both holes and wound it into a think strap. A final roll of paper contained beads – not glass or metal, but made from bits and pieces found in the wood and wold. A hazelnut with a neat hole bored in it, a glittering fragment of mica-filled rock, a knotted ball of rush. She threaded all of them onto the string and then took Laura's hand.

Laura wrinkled her nose as Carmilla pushed the bat wing bracelet onto her wrist and fastened it securely. “It will keep you safe,” she said.

She looked at Carmilla uncomprehending. “Safe from what?”

“From anything and anyone. They won't be able to touch you.” There was seriousness in her eyes now and Laura was dizzying conscious of how deep a space they opened onto. “I couldn't bear it if anyone hurt you.”

“Thank you, Carm,” said Laura who despite the macabre nature of her gift, was touched by the thought and intention. She leant forward to kiss Carmilla.

When they broke apart, Laura's hands lingering on Carmilla's upper arms, there was a smile on the girl's face again. “Any time, sweetheart,” she said.

* * *

It was twelve o'clock when Laura awoke. Which didn't make a huge amount of sense to her because she was sure it had been almost twelve o'clock when she arrived at Carn's Cairn (Karnstein's Cairn, said a voice in her head and she studiously ignored it). She sat there for a while, trying to feel like she belonged where she was, trying to steady the sense of dislocation and confusion that buzzed around her head.

Methodically she performed an inventory. No scratches, no bruises. No sore spots on her head. She stood on one leg and did not wobble. She had just fallen asleep with no warning in the middle of the day, that's all. And had a dream about Carmilla.

As an afterthought, feeling slightly stupid, she patted her arms in case the bat wing bracelet was hiding under her rolled-up sleeves. It wasn't.

So this place was clearly having an effect on her. Laura chewed over this as she walked back. She had intended to spend the whole day exploring the moors, but after the sudden dream and feeling of dislocation it had lost its appeal. She could eat her lunch on the way down and arrive back at the village at an acceptable time for an afternoon drink. She was on holiday, after all.

As she headed on down the plateau, plans started to form in her mind. First she would need to canvass the villagers more thoroughly – she’d heard from Vordenberg and JP, but Perry had suggested there were other stories about too. There was also a church, so that meant a vicar somewhere: they were usually good for gossip.

And then there were parish records too, JP had mentioned them – he’d said he’d checked for disappearing girls, but what else could there be? Given the way some families had stayed in the village for generations, maybe you could build family trees and build up some sort of a picture that way? And what about Austrian records – if the Karnsteins had been foreign, maybe the girl just went back home one day to live with other relatives?

She caught herself for a moment and steadied her mind. _Breathe Laura_ , she told herself. You were sent here to get that sort of thing out of your head. Or because other people thought you needed to get it out of your head – she wasn’t so sure any more. On the train down, and in the taxi afterwards, it had all seemed a simmering injustice that she’d been packed off. But now on the third day of peace and no contact, there was a sense that maybe it was for the best.

It was the moors that did it, maybe. They opened up, spread wide around you. Back in London everything was hemmed in, and you looked straight ahead down the street because there was concrete on each side. It gave you tunnel vision.

Laura Hollis the hard-nosed reporter, she grimaced. There had been a day – actually not so long ago when she came to think of it – when that had been an exciting thought. She’d seen all of Veronica Mars, wore a magnifying glass necklace, dreamed of the day she’d get the big scoops and have a byline on the front page.

And then she got big scoops, and then she got more and she was doing it, she was living the dream. Until that was all she was doing, and Betty started leaving her healthy dinners in the fridge with concerned notes, and Danny started mentioning holidays and sabbaticals at every instance. But it was all a distraction.

How long had it been since she read a novel? She’d read all the time as a teenager, and she had courted Danny under the guise of book discussions. Or television. Who was the current Doctor’s companion? She searched her memory and it came up blank. Six years ago she’d have been able to reel off the complete series without the slightest hesitation.

But this, this... witch hunt was different. This was a historical question. Everyone concerned was dead, and there was no editor to impress or front-page deadline to meet. So maybe this was exactly what she needed to keep her mind occupied and ticking over – creepy dreams about bat wings notwithstanding.

Although if there could be _non_ -creepy dreams starring Carmilla after the manner of last night, she wouldn’t be complaining. 

“It's the little Laura,” said a voice from her left as she stepped into the waiting shadow of the woods. She whipped round and discover Theo, the unpleasant young man from her first night here, leaning on a tree and looking pleased with himself.

She didn't ask how he had learned her name. “What are you doing here?” she asked instead.

“I work here, don't I?” He indicated a stack of chopped wood to one side of the path. “All this land is the Vordenberg estate, and I,” he waved at his chest, “keep it in condition.”

He reached out to take her by the shoulder and several things happened at once. Laura spat out a 'get off me', but before she could shake him off or he could reply, there was a a movement around them as if all the shadows in the woods had shifted and then instantly returned to their place. Theo fell backwards and landed on his side on the stony path.

“Don't touch me,” Laura told him.

“What the fuck was that?” he demanded.

She looked down at his sprawled form on the ground and noted with satisfaction the cuts on his arms. “Krav Maga,” she said, pulling the explanation from nowhere. “Done it since I was six. Don't follow me.” She turned on her heel and marched down the hill. 

It had been a good explanation, and one which might discourage him from future advances. But it hadn't been true, and Laura was just as uncomprehending about what had happened when he touched her. All she knew was that at the moment the shadows seemed to change her left wrist had tightened as if a cradle of string had been used to tie something to it.


	4. L.

“But when it comes down to it, darling, it was all about power.” 

Laura watched carefully as Matska Belmonde drained the last of her cocktail and flicked her precisely-shadowed eyes at the bar. “Power?” she prompted.

“Well. Did you know there was a Count Karnstein in Styria before the Ottoman wars? But not afterwards: our local witch was a expatriate nobleman's daughter. And then there's the old Baron – as tedious, I have no doubt, as our current Mr Vordenberg.” She relished the lack of honorific for the modern squire at the manor.

“You think it was some kind of character assassination?” Laura looked up as Perry brought a second round of drinks. A martini for Mattie – apparently Perry had martini glasses, but nobody else used them – and wine for Laura. It was, after all, already three o'clock in the afternoon and she was on holiday. 

Mattie had swept into the bar just as Laura was finishing her cup of tea and declared that the cursed stupidity of the world required her to either find something worth drinking or force the world to suffer the consequences. Laura had been happy to take the opportunity to question Matska Belmonde, during which she had found out absolutely nothing about the woman but revealed plenty about herself. And then, inevitably, the subject of witches had arisen.

“Thank you my dear, so kind.” Mattie smiled a long, slow smile, and touched Perry's wrist as she put the glass down. There was a small half-jump, and Perry scurried away red-faced to resume cleaning the fridge without saying a word.

Mattie turned back to Laura. “Hmm, perhaps. Or something more direct. Heir assassination, how about it? The old Baron arranges for the judicial execution of his rival's only child and just like that” she snapped her fingers, “there's only one dynasty in town.” The way she moved her lips implied she found the idea of dynastic murders quite delicious.

“I suppose that would work...”

“So don't kid yourself about the witchcraft, little Lois Lane. People back then didn't believe in it any more than they do today. It was just an excuse, a cover story. Power works best when it's not obvious.” She stretched her arms out like a cat and Laura watched the perfect shellac shine on her nails, painted dark red.

“Is that why you live in this place, Ms Belmonde?” she asked before she could help herself, and had a heart-stopping moment of fear before the look of annoyance turned into a beamingly proud smile.

“Very good, Miss Hollis. When you're back in London, do give my best wishes to your editor.” Her teeth were very white and she smiled very widely.

_So that was... something_ , Laura thought to herself as she emerged onto the road, realising belatedly that she was actually rather tipsy. Probably that was a bribe and a threat in one – mention my name to your boss and you'll get the seal of approval. Cause me problems, and I can get you fired. That was the substance of Mattie's message.

Not that she had any problems to cause. And prior to that Mattie had made a good point - the Vordenbergs had been Styrian nobility and their descendants now lived in the manor as the undisputed masters of the district. There was, of course, no reason at all to believe that her dream was accurate in suggesting that the land containing Carn's Cairn had once been Karnstein land – that was pure subconscious association of sounds. But nevertheless, maybe a possibility worth thinking about.

She stumbled a little mounting the steps to the museum. JP looked up at once when she entered this time, and immediately pulled a comfortable chair over from one edge of the room. From somewhere in a side room an antique kettle started threatening to either explode or make tea.

“May I enquire as to how your stay is going?” he asked, when a mug was before her. “Getting drunk in the afternoon is either a very good or a very bad sign, I find.”

“I'm a bit tipsy, not drunk!” she protested, and in proof of her industry added proudly, “I have been interviewing Ms. Belmonde.”

JP raised his eyebrows and looked suitably impressed. “And you're not dead – she must like you. What were you interviewing her about?” A packet of biscuits made its appearance from a bottom draw filled with empty wrappers.

“Witches,” she said between gingery crunches. “Karnstein.”

He looked mildly satisfied. “I believe you've caught the local bug, Miss Hollis. Three days is a short incubation period.”

“Well, I've not much else to do. I've got to keep my mind going, otherwise I'll- well, things to keep my mind off. People to keep my mind off. Sorry, I'm babbling.” Creepy dreams and sudden attacks of narcolepsy and Theo being a dick and drinks with Matska Belmonde – all that was a lot to absorb for one day. She needed to clear her mind, get it all lined up straight.

“Not at all,” JP smiled. He sat back in his chair and opened his hands. “Where have your investigations got to? Lay it all out for me.”

As if he hadn't heard it all a thousand times before. Nonetheless, she took a swig of tea and tried to summarise. “So... Vordenberg sees a straightforward story of a wicked witch and how she got her comeuppance. Perry thinks it's all rubbish. There's a hiker who came through earlier and says it was good old-fashioned misogyny; Mattie thinks competition for power. And you-” she concentrated, trying to get her thoughts in order. “You read me one other story in which the real witch was Carmilla's friend rather than Carmilla herself. But you did that mostly to show how Vordenberg might be wrong, and I _think_ you're agnostic really.”

JP inclined his head at the verdict.

“Why don't you have a theory of your own? Sorry, that sounds rude. I meant-”

“I understand what you meant.” He sighed and waved his hands trying to gather an explanation together. “I like detective stories, but I'm also a historian. You know how at the end of a murder mystery Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple or whoever gathers everyone together and then lays the facts? And then proceeds to demonstrate how those facts add up to only one possible conclusion?”

“Once you have eliminated the impossible then what remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” quoted Laura. Not a bad motto for journalism, she had always thought.

“Precisely. That's why they're fun. Everything adds up – so even when there's a red herring, it's an accounted-for and explained red herring. But history is rarely like that. The same evidence can be interpreted many different ways, and sometimes there's nothing to choose between them. History is the stories we tell to link up the debris that's come down to us, that's all it can be. And a lot of the time there's just no convincing story that can be made.” He looked ruefully in the direction of the museum door.

“But then the answer's just to find more evidence,” Laura objected. “There's always a trail if you can find it.”

“Really?” JP offered her another biscuit. “Ever had an argument with someone where you both agreed on the facts but made completely different stories out of them? You know that- Oh. I'm sorry. Should I not have said that?”

Laura had tensed up at the unexpectedly provoked memory and stopped eating with the biscuit half-way to her mouth. There was a lump in her throat. She took a deep breath and let it loosen up again. 

“Sorry,” she said. “Bit of a sore spot at the moment. Why I'm here, really.” JP was silent, not intruding but still present. “My girlfriend,” she explained. “my ex-girlfriend, really. We had one of those arguments. It wasn't nice, to see myself through her eyes. To see that everything I'd done was just making her miserable.”

He took a long time considering what he should say. “What are you going to do now?” he asked.

“I don't know,” she confessed. “After this little holiday I'll have to go back to work. Make things up with my flatmate. And then I'll have to start again, I suppose. It's exhausting, isn't it?” she turned to JP who nodded firmly. “Every time you think you've _arrived_ , you tell yourself a story that this is _it_ , this is what it's all been building to – and then it just turns out to be the prequel to whatever story you tell next.”

She paused and put some things together. “That was sort of your point, wasn't it?” she said. “That you can tell different stories with the same facts.”

“And what story you tell depends on what happens afterwards,” he confirmed. “Because that afterwards is when you're telling it. After all, we all change as we get older. Would you believe I used to go around with long hair and a leather jacket when I was a teenager?” JP added, trying to move the subject onto something lighter.

Laura coughed out a short laugh at the mental image this provoked of this neat, fussy man wearing ripped jeans and t-shirts with the names of heavy-metal bands. Her memory threw up a flashcard. “Oh really? Did you call yourself 'Ripper' as well and summon demons?”

He chuckled. “If only I had. No, but I did have a motorbike.” Laura looked dutifully impressed. “Perry was the one for casting spells back then.”

“ _Perry_? She can't stand talk of witchcraft!”

“Yes, it is very strange, isn't it? I mean, looking back it was very much just a teenage phase and God knows we all did sillier things, but she really can't abide anyone bringing it up now. One minute she was in flowing hippy clothes with all these, you know, silver sigil pendants and whatnot. And then we left school and almost at once it was turtlenecks and high-waisted jeans.”

“When did you make the switchover from studded jackets to waistcoats, then?”

“First year of university. Oxford will do that to a man.” He paused, and looked to be weighing up whether to say something. “As for you... pop culture nerd?”

She beamed, and he relaxed. Laura realised that for all his courtesy and welcome, he was a very anxious man. “Yes, I was. I had a mug shaped like the Tardis.” She hadn't thought of that in years.

* * *

There was a garden at one side of the _Brinded Cat_ , and Laura and Perry sat contentedly in the sun with a cup of tea apiece and a plate of brownies. Perry sat in a white-painted iron chair, leaning on a matching table and knitting a scarf in bright colours. Laura slumped on the grass, her back to one of several bales of straw distributed around the lawn to serve as extra summer seating. Good for walking parties, Perry had told her. They liked to lie out in the sun and stretch their legs flat.

She was still tired, she realized, even with the unexpected nap earlier. Months of exhausting oneself cannot be paid back at once and now that rest was a possibility, her body seemed determined to make the most of it. The slowly sinking pressure of the sunlight on her face, the clicking of Perry’s knitting needles, the gentle texture of grass under her feet, all merged into one presence as she began to nod.

“We should mark this place as ours,” she said to Carmilla, who perched precariously on one of the jutting boulders of Karnstein’s Cairn.

Carmilla’s face lit up in a smile at the words. She was so beautiful when she smiled, it tugged at Laura the more so because her smile came rarely. “Ours,” she confirmed. She dropped quietly to the ground beneath and tugged her bag towards her. Somewhere in its voluminous depths produced a knife. Laura watched contentedly as she knelt before one particular boulder, sheltered under a tree, and began scratching away.

Her hair was wavy, and Laura watched fascinated the bobbing and weaving of the loose half-coils. And the way her jaw sliced downwards so precisely, and the delicate strength of the shifting tendons of her shoulders.

“More tea, Laura?” asked Perry from somewhere in the garden, and she surfaced long enough to shake her head and murmur some kind of refusal before sinking back down into the waiting images.

Carmilla tucked the knife back into her bag and exhibited her work. _L+C_ , said the scratched inscription on the boulder, a heart shape traced around the letters. “There!” she said and exhibited her handiwork to Laura. “Now it's ours. Now we have somewhere where we are always together.”

Laura opened her eyes properly. She was lying in the garden as she had left it; her back to the bale of straw and a half-empty cup of tea next to her with a fly struggling not to drown in it. Perry’s scarf was a little longer in drooping from the table, but the clicking of her needles was slower.

Dreaming of Carmilla again. Four times now, and the dreams consistent with each other. Not a recurring dream: a continuing story. Or parts of a story, because there was so much missing. Did they even arrive in a meaningful order?

_Just now I dreamt we carved our initials into a boulder_ , she thought. _Earlier today I found our initials carved into a rock. Now, did I dream the carving because I saw it this morning? Or_ – a thought which would not have crossed her mind until so very recently – _did I find it this morning because I would later dream us carving it?_

From further along the road came the crunch of gravel under boots, and two voices breaking through the pleasant silence of the early evening. Laura looked up at the fence in annoyance and was sure she detected a mild sigh from Perry. The owners of the voices were coming into view – Vordenberg first, with Theo in tow. The elder man was in tweed, with a rough wooden stick and expression of energetic contentment – a proud landowner satisfied with the results of his inspection. Theo smirked when he saw Laura. 

“Deal with the rhododendron growth in New Wood first, Straka,” Vordenberg was saying. “You can save the fences till later. Ah- Miss Perry. And our young visitor. How very pleasant.” He stopped on the other side of the fence and did something halfway to a bow.

“Hello, Mr Vordenberg.” Perry did not sound overjoyed to see him. Laura gave a sleepy wave.  
“Are you enjoying your time in our village, Miss Hollis?” he asked. “Is Miss Perry treating you well?”

“Very well, thank you Mr Vordenberg.”

“I hear Straka hear has seen you out and about on the moors. Nothing too strenuous, I hope?”

Patronising. “I can cope, thank you. I only went up to Karnstein's Cairn today.”

“Carn's Cairn,” corrected Perry. She had sat straight up in her chair and spoken sharply. Laura shot a glance her way and there was something of nervousness in the way the woman looked at Vordenberg that she couldn't understand.

“Oh! Oh yes, of course,” Laura added quickly. “That was it. Gosh, it's so confusing when you come to a new place and have to learn all the names, isn't it?” She hoped the eyelash fluttering would pass muster as 'sweet'. Vordenberg smiled indulgently at her.

“I do hope you will know it like a local before long,” he said. “Straka can show you around if you need any, ah, guidance.” There was perhaps – unless she was imagining it – just a touch of emphasis on the last word. “Well, we must be off. A very good evening to you ladies.” He touched the brim of his cap and turned down the road.

Theo lingered leaning on the split wood of the fence for a moment longer. “Not much to see up on the Cairn,” he said to Laura. “Not much point going up there.” And then he too turned down the road and trotted after Vordenberg's retreating back.

Perry pursed her lips. “What an unpleasant boy,” she said, and then before Laura could ask her the meaning of what had just passed, she stood firmly up and marched back inside, carrying her knitting with her. Laura was left sitting in confusion on the grass, agitatedly pulling straw out of the bale to her back.

Abstractedly, not quite paying attention to what she was doing, she began twisting the handful of straw. One long interwoven body, then dividing the bottom half into a fork. Pulling out two bundles from opposite sides about three-quarters of the way up. She twined the limbs carefully together and held the crude doll in the palm of her hand. What had she made it for?

There was a chime from the church bell and Laura registered that dinner would be soon. She picked up her empty teacup and, still clutching the straw doll, made her way inside and up to her room. 

She saw her hand extend and toss the doll into the fireplace. Then, as if dreaming, she watched as she herself retrieved the battered box of matches from the mantelpiece, struck one, and set the little figure on fire.


	5. Lotion

There were four chairs at the table and Wilson Kirsch took up two of them. He had lumbered in, head always on the verge of hitting one of the pieces of miscellaneous metalwork hanging from the ceiling, and landed in the chair next to JP so firmly that Laura was sure she heard splintering. Perry bustled by with a trilled 'boots, Kirsch!', and he apologetically removed his muddy boots before replacing his enormous feet on the second chair and slapping JP on the back in greeting.

“Bloody hard day,” he said to JP's enquiry. “Got the sheep on Blundel Moor to move over for marking and Theo's in bed with a fever.” He shook his head. “Had the doctor come over for a visit, his temperature was so high he couldn't even get up. So I had to do it all myself in the end.” Kirsch took a breath and savoured sitting down before finally noticing Laura.

“Hey, awesome!” he exclaimed when JP had introduced her as Laura the visiting journalist. “So you like, find out all the secrets in high places and stuff?” He looked at her with big, enthusiastic eyes and she felt herself warming to him.

“Sometimes,” she said. “My last big investigation was bribery, for instance. A supermarket chain was giving big 'consultancy fees' to local councillors and just _happened_ to get planning permission for basically turning a whole town centre into a retail park.” She omitted the investigation which had followed, the one that had led her to Burnt Tawton.

“Laura's been investigating the local witch too,” JP added with a hint of pride. “Another glass, Laura? Still on the pinot grigio?” He stood up.

“Can I have a-” Kirsch began, but JP was already on his way to the bar.

“Pint of Tribute, packet of prawn cocktail crisps and I'll see if Perry's got any Scotch eggs,” he said over his shoulder and Kirsch broke out into a smile. 

“Real bro, JP,” he said, and stretched his arms above his head. One of the joints clicked unpleasantly. “Knows all about the witch stuff, he does.” He leaned over. “I saw this thing on TV, right? And it said that witches were, like, a fertility cult. And that was why people didn't like them.”

Laura wasn't sure of the appropriate response. “Oh?”

“Totally. 'Cos they were going to lonely places and – you know – going at it.” He lowered his voice and looked significantly at Laura. “They used to dance round in a circle, all naked.” There was a faraway look creeping into his eyes. Laura raised an eyebrow. Apparently Kirsch had an active imagination. 

“That's why witches were mostly women, right?” continued Kirsch. “They were, like, all going skyclad together and the men didn't like it. Would have been hot, though.”

Laura bit down any reply. JP returned to the table with her wine and beer for himself and Kirsch.

“That's right, isn't it Jeep?” he asked. “Witches were, you know, rites and orgies and stuff.”

JP sighed. “Kirsch, I have told you before about the dangers of trashy late-night films.” Kirsch looked mildly sheepish and muttered something about nothing else being on. “Although it is true that sexual allegations were frequently made in early modern witch trials-”

“-chicks getting it on together under the moon-”

“Mostly heterosexual allegations against women,” JP corrected him, with an apologetic side glance at Laura for Kirsch's fetishisation. “As it was conceived that witchcraft would involve relations with the devil. Male witches might well be accused of sodomy. But that was almost routine.”

“Shit times,” said Kirsch, and he looked a little downcast. “Hotties not even allowed to have girlfriends without people saying they're witches.” A flash of stylish silk went past on the road outside the window and he added, “Speaking of which, any sign of Perry and Belmonde getting a move on?”

JP shook his head. “Nope. But the tension's so thick you could stand a spade in it. I hear Belmonde is planning to have some associates down in October for a little meeting, and she's hired Perr for catering up at the house.” He took a sip of beer. “A fiver says then.”

“Nah bro, they'll never last that long!” protested Kirsch. “What's your bet, Laura?”

Laura studied Perry's shoulders as she stood behind the bar rearranging glasses. “Mattie knows what she's doing,” she decided. “I agree with JP.” She yawned. “Sorry, I think I'm a bit tired. Did quite a lot of walking today.”

She had been gathering herbs, in fact. Her list of necessary ingredients was long and complex, and further complicated by the fact that the different species grew in sometimes very specific environments. How she could recognise them was a bigger mystery: Laura had never known anything at all about herbs, but today she had been able do no wrong.

* * *

That morning had begun as the previous few mornings had, casting her up out of the depths of her dreams. She lay on her bed, breathing hard and letting the memories come back. Carmilla again. She hadn't really expected anything different.

It had been in the woods this time rather than the moor. Carmilla led her around, occasionally stopping to steal a kiss or point out something of interest. But it was herbs they tracked and the girl Laura became in the dream exclaimed at Carmilla's knowledge. Frequently the other woman quizzed her: _what did I just say? How much of this herb did I take? Remember this._

There had certainly been a bat wing bracelet in the dream. She remembered seeing it on her outstretched hand when picking mugwort. At one point, Carmilla had been very insistent that they pick not merely the correct leaves, but leaves growing in one exact spot. She had taken out her knife and carved a marker on a tree stump. 

There had been the woodland floor as well, with the crossing feelers of ivy that tickled Laura's face when Carmilla had laid her down and slowly, agonisingly stripped her. Laura tried to summon up the images, but they melted away into a vague stew of face and lips and hands and such soft thighs.

Her nights were becoming more and more exciting, but her mornings were becoming more and more frustrated.

After dragging herself out of her sticky bed and taking a long time showering, she had sat in the little cane chair next to her fireplace and looked at the small pile of fluffy ash that sat in the bottom of the grate. In the fresher light of morning, her actions of yesterday evening seemed less innocent. It was a threatening thing, to make a doll and burn it. Something about that wasn't right. It was an action like slashing a picture or tearing up a letter – even if harmless, it spoke of violence.

Why had she done it? She hadn't made any decision, just watched herself do it. It had been like performing an action so long practised that it had ceased to need voluntary control. Or perhaps like an instinctual action, too deeply embedded to require conscious expression. Either way, the impression was that her life was taking a turn that could not be entirely accounted for by her waking consciousness. But as to what could be lurking down below the surface of her volition, she had no idea. And so with nothing else occurring to her, she had followed the promptings of her instincts and gone into the woods.

They were not deep woods, nor too thick save for a curtain of dense undergrowth maintained on either side of the road and on the woods' further fringes. But partly because of the muffling effect of this border, and partly because of the remoteness of the little valley they straggled along, they were very quiet. There was the gentle running of the stream, the desultory calling of pigeons, and the occasional crowing of a pheasant. Now and again a patch of greenery would tremble as a pheasant broke out in front of her to run to a different patch.

There was much open ground made within the woods, little clearings made by cutting down two or three trees close to each other. These made sunlit glades full of bees and butterflies, where songbirds were tempted down from the moors to sing for a while, and where Laura found the first of the herbs told to her by Carmilla. There were tough, woody little plants with spiked leaves thrusting up amongst the luxuriant grass of glade floor – she plucked softer leaves from their crowns.

Other plants were found on the shadowy floors, soft flat-lying flowers from which she took petals and fuzzy leaves. By the stream she found lolling ferns which she pulled up and broke the stems from using her foot and a handy stone. Two or three times she was indecisive and, hovering her hand over a candidate felt a certain pull of knowledge, as if a memory were seeping in. Once or twice she wondered if the whisper of Carmilla's voice in her ears was really just her remembering of the dream, and she turned around to see nobody at all.

There was one final item she needed that could only come from one place and it took her some time to find. But nestled in a curve of the stream and shadowed over by a pair of enormous ashes with drooping boughs, was a worn and partly rotted stump with the mark that Carmilla had placed on it in her dream.

_L + C_ , read the carving on the stump, and around it a heart shape. Laura's fingers traced the letters she had seen for the first time up on Karnstein's Cairn and followed the softly rotting bark down to the cluster of bright green sprouting leaves sticking out of the soil at its base. She plucked them whole, able only to accept the wonder and not question or analyse it. The ivy in that place was thick and undisturbed. Nobody had lain face-down there in the night, gasping out Carmilla's name as a hand wound its way between their legs.

She had to secretly borrow a pestle and mortar from Perry's kitchen when she got back, and purloined some rubber gloves while she was there. The hard-grained stone of the mortar smelled faintly of spices, and she scrubbed the implements vigorously until the hint of cumin was gone. Carmilla hadn't said anything about preparation in the dream, so she let herself be guided by instinct and refused to question why her instincts might suddenly be effective in the preparation of a potion.

She mashed the soft leaves into a rough mess and then drew out the stringy remains of stems. What sat in the bottom of the mortar was a greenish juice with bits floating in it; threw in flower petals and stripped little nubs off of twigs. Finally she arrived at something like a green juice, which was somewhat inconvenient.

In the bottom of her not-entirely-unpacked suitcase was a half-empty pot of hand cream. She sniffed it, then shrugged and just poured the juice in and mixed them around with a pencil end. A green lotion spotted with flecks of leaf and petal and smelling mainly of damp woodland was the result.

* * *

It was nearly midnight. Laura waited for the signifying ring of the church bell, although there seemed no particular reason to do so beyond the obvious necessity of waiting until Perry was asleep - just in case. Nonetheless she had wrapped herself up in her dressing gown and curled up in the cane chair with reading material provided by the library until she heard the clang. Agatha Christie knew how to tell them. Every little thing tied up, and all neatly laid out by a fastidious Belgian. 

But despite the intricacies of how to murder someone on a plane where nobody could get out of their seats, she was distracted by her own mysteries. She had sat here this morning wondering about the significance of the little straw doll burned the previous night. Well, it had been incomprehensible this morning, but now there was unpleasant significance to the fact that Theo was ill with a fever. Burning up – as Kirsch had not actually said, but as she could quite easily fill in for him. She had made the doll immediately after speaking to him, after all, while she was still brimming with anger against the man. Had she-?

The chime of the church bell cut through the quiet night and jolted her out of this speculation. 

She wasn't entirely sure what the lotion was actually for, beyond that she was clearly meant (by someone or something) to use it. There were no obvious wounds to smear it on as if it were a medicine. Should she be describing it as a paste instead and eating it? In the end she settled for scooping a lump with two fingers and rubbing it into her hands. At least if it turned out to be deadly poison she might escape with a rash. And it had been made with hand cream anyway.

The night seemed to hold its breath when she finished. Then, very gently, and not entirely pleasantly, her palms began to tingle. It was a little like putting your hands into warm water after coming in our of the cold, a pricking over the surface that itched and tugged. In front of her, a couple of fingers twitched like they knew what was coming.

“OK,” she whispered to whatever was happening. “You know what to do. Do it.”

She watched her right hand extend. It was a curious sensation, half-controlled and half not. Like shifting into a comfortable position or shivering in the cold. Or sleepwalking. She watched her hand dip back into the pot and come up with another small splatter of greenish ooze.

Her eyes closed instinctively st the approach of her hand, and what felt as if they were somebody else's fingertips gently anointed her eyelids. When her hand dropped and she opened her eyes, the room was as it had been before.

“What happens now?” she asked. Except for a slight tingle on her eyelids nothing pushed itself on her attention. A vague crunch outside faded away and was probably a cat crossing the road. Even the mirror in her little bathroom showed her familiar face. The dark shadows and bags under her eyes were still there, but less hollow than they had been. Her face was a bit weather-beaten, stung pink by the wind and sun but not yet fading into brown. Longish black hair- _brown_ hair. She had brown hair. And the mirror definitely showed brown hair now, but there had been a split second when she had seen black. Laura leaned closer. Light brown eyes, with a tint of green ointment clinging to the bases of the eyelashes. She closed one eye to inspect her eyelid and when she opened it her eye was dark.

She jumped in surprise, and when she was still again her own eyes stared out at her. Her heart hammering in her chest and her breath coming suddenly very fast, she stared at her reflection. She stared until the images in front of her became blurry and started to shake, and the figure in the mirror became a vague shifting smudge that almost might have been two people. _Through the looking glass_ , she thought.

She felt sick. There was a pressure in her chest and dizziness in her head and things were taking on the bright, brittle appearance they do when in a fever. Her body was light, light and fuzzy as if highly medicated or sleepwalking.

“Looking for something?” asked Carmilla from behind her.

Laura spun and stepped first forward and then back in wonder. It _was_ Carmilla, looking as solid as if she were really there. Looking so solid that she _must_ be really there. She lounged against Laura's desk, half sitting on it and wearing an expression of satisfaction. Her face was the face that Laura had seen in her dreams – sharp jaw, angled brows, deep dark eyes, pale skin, everything down to the way her cheeks dimpled slightly.

“You're real,” Laura breathed, and clapped her hand to her mouth. “I mean, you're here and I'm not dreaming. Wait: am I dreaming?” She pinched herself, which resulted in dull pain rather than awakening, although that was hardly convincing. Maybe she'd just dreamt pinching herself. The inside of her head still felt groggy, but the appearance of Carmilla had drained the sickness away, replaced by more of the light brittle unreality of feverish sleepwalking.

Carmilla peeled herself away from the door frame and wandered languidly into the bedroom. “Oh I'm as real as you, cupcake.” She sat down on the bed cross-legged in her black leather trousers. She wore no shoes and her bare feet were stained with dust.

Laura's brain caught up with her. “You're wearing a t-shirt,” she said. Carmilla looked down at her chest and shrugged in vague assent. It was purple and black tie-dye, closely fitted and slightly too short, hugging her like a corset. Laura reflected that if she was dreaming, her unconscious was at least putting on a show.

“Yeah,” Carmilla agreed. “You getting bored of stating the obvious yet, creampuff?” She leant back on the bed.

Laura hesitated forward and took hold of her arm. It felt solid enough. Beneath the soft warm skin was tangible muscle and the bone at the centre. “You called me 'creampuff',” she said. “That can't be right.” Carmilla's eyes were calm under her sharp brows and watched her with mild amusement. “They didn't _have_ creampuffs in the seventeenth century. They didn't have t-shirts either!”

Carmilla laughed, a low confident chuckle. “We're not _in_ the seventeenth century, in case you haven't noticed.” 

Laura stopped short. “You're not dead?” she asked, and the absurdity of the question jolted her. Despite all the dreams and strange occurrences she had still been thinking of Carmilla as something from the past. Somebody without a present or a future.

“Why don't you tell me?” Carmilla said, and guided Laura's head down to press their lips together. If this was a dream, it smelt and tasted just like reality.

As they broke the kiss, Laura felt the need spread through her as if she were newly arising from her dreams of sex and Carmilla. She needed her lips, and the soft hollow at the base of her neck, and the skin of her shoulder when she determinedly pushed the shirt aside. And she needed also the feeling of Carmilla's own lips on her cheeks and neck and down to the closure of her dressing gown. 

There was a flurry of limbs and then Laura was straddling Carmilla's lap, kissing her through tongue and teeth. She was enveloped in the scent of her skin, feeling the gentle but so agonising pressure of hands running over her breasts, pushing aside the dressing gown and dropping it to the bed behind her. The excitement was rising in her quickly, and then Carmilla's thigh was between her legs and she _had_ to push against it-

She pulled away and sat up. “I don't understand any of this,” she confessed, suddenly aware of what she was doing. Carmilla looked up at her with those unfathomable eyes. “I don't understand who you are. What _are_ you? What _happened_ in 1698? What are you doing in my dreams?”

Carmilla lifted herself up on one elbow and touched Laura's cheek gently with her other hand. “You know enough,” she purred. “You know everything you need to. Don't worry, cutie.”

“I don't!” Laura protested, “I-”, but Carmilla's thumb ran across her mouth and pulled down at her lower lip, and the words evaporated from her mind as the taste of her skin blossomed in Laura's mouth. She toppled forward, pushing Carmilla back onto the bed.

She knew Carmilla's body already, had explored it before in her dreams several times. She knew the way the breath in her ear would catch when she breathed on the side of her neck, knew the way Carmilla's eyes would unfocus with the touch of Laura's tongue to her nipples. She knew the sound, half cry and half purr, torn out of the woman's throat when she spread her thighs and moved in with her mouth.

And Carmilla knew her too, somehow even better. She knew how Laura would twist and turn in the attempt to push herself further onto Carmilla's fingers, and had mastered the slow dropping of relished words into Laura's ears that would drive shame out and replace it with desperation. Finally, she understood how gauge the right moment to pause, and wait, and begin again.

* * *

“Thank you for the batwing bracelet, by the way,” Laura said when all was done and quiet. They lay twined around each other, listening to the faint call of an owl from somewhere up in the woods. She raised her left arm, where no bracelet could be seen but where her wrist displayed faint red lines as if something tied by a string had been rubbing the skin. All the questions and confusions of the past week were still floating in her mind, but she had closed the floodgates and let them stay there for now.

It occurred to her that she had only ever seen the bracelet in dreams and that it disappeared when awake. And she couldn't see it now – did that mean anything?

Carmilla reached up to trace the edges of the unseen, unfelt charm with her fingers. “No problem. It's not a big thing. It'll give people a shock, and if they're not expecting it they'll do themselves an injury, but don't go expecting it to protect you from someone determined and prepared.” She pulled Laura's hand down to offer a kiss to her fingertips.

Laura pushed her nose into the side of her neck affectionately. “Even so. It's helped.”

The owl somewhere in the distance settled down into silence and there was no sound at all save the very faint, very slow breathing from the woman next to her. Laura closed her eyes for a moment and then for a moment longer. She was warm and comfortable and there was a hand draped around her in a way that spoke of safety. She realised that in the midst of this unaccountable night that she wasn't worried at all and wasn't that the strangest thing of all?

“By the way,” she heard Carmilla whisper as she drifted off into sleep – or perhaps into a dreamless phase of sleep - “You don't have to be so conservative with the ointment. Don't be afraid. Come with me a-hunting.”


	6. Life

Night time is psyche time. Morning is holy terror - she'd read that somewhere. The moment of rootless exposure to the contraries expended during the night, or something like that.

There was nobody in bed next to her. There wasn't even a dint in the pillow or wrinkled depression in the sheets, for all that they smelled of sex and sweat. No wavy black hairs gathered on the white cotton, no dust trampled onto the duvet by bare feet.

Laura crawled out of bed. Muscles ached: abdominals, inner thighs. Her face and hands needed washing, cracked bits of dried green lotion clinging between her fingers and in the corners of her eyes. Her face in the mirror had dark circles again and her hair would be a nightmare to get a brush through.

Hot water helped her dissolve the first layer of tensions. She'd always felt self-conscious on mornings after a passionate night. Danny had learned to let her shower and get herself in order before returning to bed for a morning resumption. Maybe if she put on a bit more of the ointment while getting dressed she'd get back to find- but no. She may or may not be going mad, but acting on the assumption that summoning up a lover via magical potions was a normal method for conducting relationships would certainly tip her over the boundary of 'insane'.

_Get your journalist brain in order_ , Laura she told herself while putting on her bra, only partly to distract her from the memory of Carmilla tugging her top off. _There is something unaccountable. Assemble hypotheses._ There was an older part of her brain that didn't want to, that wanted instead to go into the mystery as mystery. Somewhere a raggedy man in a police box smiled beamingly at the monster, and a vampire-killing cheerleader chose to kiss one.

Determindly she chose jeans and a loose shirt. The _first_ hypothesis was that the whole thing was a hallucination brought on by not knowing what the fuck she was putting in the potion. Reasons in favour: simple, rational and most of all, psychologically plausible that her recently-single subconscious would enjoy hallucinating a hot goth girl. Reasons against: the state of her bed and body did not suggest merely an elevated form of sexy dream. She'd had sex, not dreamt it.

She was running short on socks – it was time to talk to Perry about laundry. Anyway, the second hypothesis was that Carmilla was out there somewhere, had apparated into her room and then left by the same method. Reasons in favour: accounted for modern clothes with no time travel required. Reasons against: the 'immortal teleporting lesbian seduction witch' concept was possibly even _less_ plausible than some of the villagers' stories. Talk about pulp film titles.

The third hypothesis was that dream and reality were not so distinct as she might have imagined. Reasons in favour: best of both worlds, accounting for things like the carving of initials in dreams followed by finding them in the real world. Reasons against: it was only one step away from throwing up her hands and despairing of explanation.

She checked herself for respectability in the mirror. Not bad for a woman who'd concocted a forbidden piece of herbery and then summoned up a succubus before heading out to confidently track down an ancient witch. A smile cracked open in front of her at the thought and it even looked genuine. She'd almost forgotten what it was like to properly relish the investigation, but with the sun pouring in through the open window and the smell of far-off heather in the air, Laura recognised that for the first time in months she was having fun.

* * *

She was part way through bounding downstairs when the strained tones of a difficult conversation made her stop. She froze just behind the bend in the staircase and crouched down low. It was happening ing the kitchen. One voice was Vordenberg's, quiet but insistent, completely certain of being heeded. Perry's replies were tense and unhappy.

“-Straka was well enough today to pay me a visit,” Vordenberg was saying, “and he had some, ah, _remarkable_ things to say about his illness.”

Perry was quiet for a moment. “Yes?”

“Hmm, yes indeed. He had many dreams in his fever – oh, nothing unusual in that I grant you. But when they all involved a little straw figure being set alight... well, I see you comprehend my little visit today.”

“It wasn't me!” protested Perry. Her voice rose to a strangled urgency. “It wasn't! Maybe it was just a, a coincidence! People do dream!”

Laura pressed herself closer to the bannister. A straw figure? “Oh indeed,” Vordenberg was saying. “I myself had a remarkable series involving the Prussian cavalry when the flu was going round. But for a man to dream the same thing again and again, I think it is significant. And so I immediately thought about that _upsetting_ summer twelve years ago.”

Perry said nothing, but the quality of the silence suggested to Laura that there were tears choking her throat.

“You haven't been returning to old habits I hope, Miss Perry?” Pause. “No? Hmm. But do keep in contact if you have anything more to-” He stopped short as the front door creaked open and the rustling of skirts and tapping of heels announced the arrival of Matska Belmonde.

“Knock knock-” purred Mattie, but she evidently noticed Vordenberg's presence because her voice lost the cheerfully predatory manner with which Perry was habitually addressed. “Oh. Good morning, Mr Vordenberg,” she added, implying with her tone that the good morning was now an item of the past.

“Ms B- Belmonde,” stuttered Perry, and there was no mistaking the tears. Heels clicked across the floor and in the distraction Laura shifted down a couple of steps to peek around the corner of the staircase walls. Perry was turned in her direction, Vordenberg and Belmonde on different sides with their backs in Laura's direction.

“I think,” said Mattie in tones that dropped the temperature several degress, “that you should be on your way, Vordenberg. Whatever you've said, it's enough. Now!” she added in a hiss as Vordenberg tried to open his mouth. Looking affronted, he drew himself up and gripped his stick – but then thought better and offered a token inclination of his head. He stepped beyond Laura's sight and the front door heaved open.

“I did come around to talk about the catering arrangements for my little gathering,” she said, “but that can wait. Shall I hurt him for you? It would be a pleasure.” Perry flinched, but then looked into Mattie's eyes. A small smile twitched the corner of her mouth.

“No,” she shook her head. “But it's nice of you to offer, Ms Belmonde. In your own... menacing way.”

“Darling, I don't do hankies and I didn't bring chocolates. Not today, anyway.” Laura feared she might be about to witness a moment.

“Well. Thank you for getting rid of him. It was... unexpectedly considerate of you.” Perry sniffed and brought herself into some form of composure.

“Any time. After all, I can't have strange old men intimidating my barkeeper. No, that's _my_ job.” She moved closer and Perry's eyes fixed on her face with wide confusion. Mattie's hand twined gently a winding curl of her red-gold hair. “Ciao, bella.” And to her amazement, Mattie touched her on the cheek and came away with a tear. She touched it to her lips and turned on her heel leaving Perry standing there dumfounded. Laura rapidly scuttled up the stairs again lest Perry run for her bedroom.

* * *

The day passed sluggishly. Laura had no appetite to go walking in case she discovered something which would demand her time or attention. She mooched around the village, read in the pub garden, bothered Perry's furious stress-relieving shortbread making. It being Monday, JP came round for an early dinner before the pub opened up for the evening and Laura managed to distract herself for an hour or so absorbing the exchange of gossip between the two. JP's datemate was in a high fever of excitement over their latest piece of biological research, and Perry immediately decreed that they needed to be sent a sustaining hamper because 'you know what happened last time LaFontaine was onto something and forgot to eat for a week'. Perry discussed the doings of everyone in the village except Matska Belmonde, and blushed furiously every time her name was casually dropped in by one of the others.

But part of Laura was somewhere else throughout it all, until the point when she stood naked in her bedroom with the pot of ointment open on the bedside table and her attention concentrated itself on the moment. It wasn't yet eleven o'clock, but her heart had been beating in her chest so hard and fast for the last two hours that waiting longer was impossible. The night showed no sings of cooling down – her window was wide open and she was still hot.

In the sober light of morning she had resolved to proceed cautiously and to apply only marginally more tonight than yesterday since _curiosity killed the cat_ , but by the time night had fallen she had converted entirely to the view that _satisfaction brought it back_.

She left her hands till last. It was a very large pot, the kind you buy when you want the luxury of not having to think about replacing it, but it was considerably more than half empty by the time she finished. Her shoulders were first, and then all over her torso doing her best to cover the difficult to reach parts of her back. The ointment left a tugging, tingling sensation in its wake and by the time she moved over her stomach the feeling of lightness was beginning to work its effects. No time for blushing as she coated her legs and backside, she was surely past that by now. And finally her face, neatly dabbing her eyelids and cheeks. That would probably do. 

She waited for Carmilla to appear, but nothing happened. Several minutes passed in a state of nervous anticipation. 

The heat was unpleasant on the upper floor of the pub, and even the wide open window couldn't tempt a breeze in. It was so hot. And, as she slowly started to realise, not just outside, or in the room – it was hot _inside_ her. She could feel it, right at her heart, a fever going right down into her core. She must be radiating heat.

And energy. She wanted to move. She wanted to run. It was ridiculous to stay cooped up inside when the night outside was so inviting. All those woods and moors to go running on. God, she couldn't miss out on the feeling of midnight breezes on her bare skin. 

Even the door down to the ground floor of the inn wasn't right. How stupid to go creeping up and down those cramped indoor passages when the window was so easy to get down from! All you had to do was jump up onto the sill like this and then swing out to catch hold of the drainpipe. It was so easy. All those shoes and socks she usually wore made things more difficult than they needed to be when it came to crouching there, and clothes just caught on protruding objects. So it was the right idea to be naked.

Laura looked down at the ground from her position on the wall gripping the drainpipe and she saw lightheadedly how easy it would be to get down. She leaned out and dived backwards, catching the ground with her outstretched hands and turning her landing into a head-over-heels roll before coming upright again. Not difficult at all, not with the feeling of prickling all over her skin and a raging heat in her belly.

The village was open and empty in the moonlight, but the road wasn't to her taste. She hastened round to the path threading its ways between back garden and felt no sharpness from the stray gravel and twigs underfoot. Upwards, she knew. Upwards to the moors.

The woods were even quieter this night than they had been the other day. She had a feeling that the silence was not merely due to circumstantial absence of noise, but that everything which would naturally have made a sound was hushing itself and creeping fearfully into a hiding place. The dark under the trees was a pervading dark far beyond what she was used to in the city and yet she saw her way through perfectly until she came out onto the moors.

The sky above her was in motion. Bats flocked from their roosts in the woods and blotted out for short instants the cascade of stars above and the beaming full moon. Somewhere on the southern horizon was a spill of amber for Plymouth, but to the north and east and all around was only the wide open moor. Winding Draco was sprawled out over the zenith of the sky, but the Lynx marked the northern horizon and she pursued it. The heather that had so lashed her legs during her daylight forays that she'd worn heavy trousers despite the heat was of no concern to her tonight. She parted it like cotton wool. She felt warm throughout, and light of foot and most of all, safe. This was her night and she needed no clothes when she wore the landscape. Karnstein's Cairn was ahead of her and she crossed the last difficult patch of broken earth with ease. 

She sensed Carmilla coming before there was even sight or sound of her. There was first of all the knowledge of her arrival, and then the sound of rustling heather, something she could suddenly break down into the component noises of wind-stirring and footsteps with enormous clarity, and then finally the pale bare limbs of her lover advancing gracefully from boulder to boulder in the moonlight. Laura took her in, dark hair streaming in the gusts that shook the birch trees, arms stretching wide up as with a dancer's pose. And then they were together and kissing each other with a devouring fury.

Carmilla pulled her down into a hollow of tussock grass between jutting stones and moved her kisses from Laura's mouth to her neck and down over her breasts to her stomach. Her lips and lapping tongue were soft; and then suddenly her tongue was not soft at all, but rough. 

Laura's eyes had been closed, but they flew open and for the first time that night she knew fear. It was not Carmilla there as she had seen her before, but her teeth were lengthening and her hands clutching at Laura's hips sprouted claws as the fingers withdrew into furred pads. The witch's eyes stared up into Laura's as the black-coated panther lapped at her navel with its sandpaper tongue.

Laura feared her skin would rip under the pressure of Carmilla's fangs, but when it did it revealed a carpet of silky hair beneath. Carmilla tore strips off her belly and in the rents of flesh stood out richly patterned tawny fur.

How painfull it had been all her life to keep herself folded in like this! She flexed and arched her back and the thin film of humanity broke apart. She stepped out of her skin a golden-brown cat only a little smaller than the giant black panther who nuzzled her.

Her world was transformed. The night was still dark, but her eyes penetrated through it to the finest of details. She drank in the scents. Heather, yes, she could smell that even when human. But now the subtle hints of furze and fireweed and, further away, drying sphagnum in cracked peat stood out like notes in music. She caught the tang of sheep being pastured and the reek of human settlement rising from the little valley below, the salt of high winds blown in from the sea above. Most of all the two smells of Carmilla enveloped her, the withdrawing hints of her as human and the new cat smell.

They were away. The desire to run which had been with her since the bedroom could be sated now, and new urges rose in her with the silent pounding of padded feet. It was hunting time, and she breathed in the scent trails that led like ribbons to the dens and burrows. 

_Come with me a-hunting._

Carmilla led her, but she strove to outdo the black panther. Time faded away under the endless moment of the chase, no past or future but only the hunt where claw and fang sliced into arteries and she gulped deep mouthfuls of blood when the struggling creature abruptly ceased its thrashing. And there was blood matting her fur, and blood soaking Carmilla's as they ate what they had caught, tearing it apart between their jaws.

_More!_ she keened out to the night. _More! Only let it never stop!_

But then Carmilla rippled and stood upright as a girl again. No mistaking the new invitation in her eyes as she ran back up to the stream and Laura came following on lightning strides.

The worst of the blood came off in the stream, washing easier from smooth human skin than from thick fur, but the metallic taste of it was still on Carmilla's body when when she kissed it. Her senses thrilled with detail even out of the cat body. Blood, and under it the delicious taste of Carmilla's skin mixed with perspiration and the beating essence of strong life giving shape to it all.

Feeling Carmilla enter her, fingers sliding and parting her folds. She cried out and thrust down onto her lover's hands and felt teeth nipping her neck. The moon came through the gaps in Carmilla's tangled hair. Pushing herself forward into Carmilla's rutting hips. Fucking Carmilla, holding her from behind as Laura found ways to draw out more and more shudders. Hearing the girl who had hunted her gasp and plead sank into Laura's soul and she hissed in joy up at the moon when Carmilla finally climaxed.

“Come with me again,” Carmilla whispered in her ear when they lay finally in a dirt hollow and panted their long recovery. “Come with me a-hunting.”


	7. Loss

Laura awoke in her own bed and lay there collecting her thoughts for some minutes. She tested her body experimentally to check it was still human. The latter part of the previous night was a complete blur – not that any of the earlier memories from last night rendered an especially coherent account, but it had definitely gone entirely into blackness after the bloodstained sex.

She rinsed out her mouth with water and spat into the sink. Trails of blood accompanied it down the drain. There were livid scratches on her calves and her legs ached like she'd been running all night. Perhaps unsurprsing in the circumstances. Red-brown gunk under her fingernails needed careful removing before she felt acceptably human again and she tried very carefully not to think about its origins. She tried not to think about a lot of things just yet.

By the time she was out of the shower and coming into a more manageably clean state, she became aware that a low hum of voices was drifting in through the open window. Peeking out, she could see what must have been almost the whole village gathered in a knot in the middle of the road. She bounded downstairs and came out into the morning sun to join them.

A couple of dozen people stood around in a loose circle, some of them discussing urgently with each other, others looking around for somebody to speak more generally. A teenage girl had gone to lean over the wall of the churchyard and by the fluttering of her friends around her it appeared she was feeling sick. Laura slipped her way through the crowd and insinuated herself between Perry and JP. Perry had her hand clapped over her mouth.

“Oh my God,” breathed Laura. Around her, others were saying words to the same effect.

On the ground were the remains of a pair of sheep, their bellies torn open and entrails trampled into the road. Additional dismembered pieces lay strewn everywhere in a chaos of body parts, but nobody could have doubted that they had been substantially eaten. All around over the tarmac of the road and grass of the verge was blood: thrown in streamers, congealed in puddles, and impressed in the form of smudged animal footprints on the road.

Behind the crowd came the growling of a Land Rover and Theo jumped out to help Vordenberg out of the passenger seat. The villagers parted. 

“Found them earlier, sir,” he reported, raising his voice so that everyone could be included in his account.

“Ours?” asked Vordenberg. He came closer and experimentally lifted the corner of a leg with the end of his stick. A circle of yellow dye was revealed on the sheep's haunch and he nodded. “It would appear so. Any ideas, Straka?”

“I don’t know,” Theo confessed. “Something big, anyway.” He squatted and prodded at a slashed belly. JP shifted position uncomfortably at Laura's shoulder and she felt the bottom of her stomach sinking lower and lower.

“Don’t exaggerate,” grumbled a man’s voice from somewhere in the crowd. “These things always look worse than they are. Sheep has a fall or gets hit by a car and then a fox digs around and makes a mess after it's dead. Seen it before.” There was a vague chorus of agreement.

Theo shook his head. “Not this time. One sheep, that’d be likely. Two means it wasn’t an accident. Foxes dig in to go for the offal – this one’s still got its liver.” A few people turned away in nausea as he demonstrated. “And foxes don’t spend an hour slowly gnawing off a head. No, these weren’t scavenged. They were killed this way.”

“Dog?” suggested someone.

“Big dog, could be,” he nodded. “Would have to be ferocious.” He stood up and scanned the crowd. “Wilson! Look at these.” 

Kirsch looked distressed at being singled out, but he loped forward and knelt on the ground. Underneath the torn torso that Theo had been poking at was a cleaner patch of road on which bloodstains were less thick and a couple of footprints stood out more clearly.

“Not a dog,” he said after a deep think. “The claws, see? Maybe… they look like a cat’s. Only way too big.” Whispering followed his announcement.

He shifted along and hovered gingerly over one of the disembodied heads, before Theo heaved a sigh and kicked it out of the way for him. Kirsch offered no explanation for his sudden recoil but the assembled village craning forward could see for itself that the print outlined in blood was of a bare human foot.

The immediate hubbub was quelled by Vordenberg pounding his stick on the ground and calling for silence. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said insistently. “There is no need to panic. Mr Kirsch: are you sure?”

Kirsch wobbled his head. “Not really, I guess. I mean, it’s definitely not a dog print. And it looks like a big version of a cat print, but then I don’t know how real big cats step. Not like we have any in this country.”

“And the woman?” Vordenberg asked. “Or man,” he added hurriedly, but the realization of his immediate assumption was already spreading out amongst the listeners. Kirsch just shrugged, unable to offer any calming explanation. It was unclear to anyone afterwards just who it was first said the word ‘witch’, but after muttering had gone on in groups of two or three for a little too long, someone said it loudly.

“That’s what we’re all thinking,” she said defiantly. “That’s the story, isn't it?”

“Come now, Miss Ellis,” said Vordenberg soothingly. “All long past. A colourful spot of local history. The witch is dead three hundred years. My ancestor burned her, you know!” He said the last triumphantly, as if he himself had done it.

“So you say,” countered the defiant Miss Ellis. “He says she escaped.” She nodded towards JP, who flushed red at his sudden role as maverick historian.

“I have, um, merely recounted an older version of the story than the one familiar from Albert Vordenberg’s book in which the witch was not-,” he began.

“But in any case,” pushed on Vordenberg regardless, not waiting for JP to finish, “it is hardly plausible-”

“-too proud of his ancestors to see what's in front of his face,” said someone at the back.

“Happened before, sir,” put in Theo. “You remember. I remember. You all remember!” he lifted up his voice. “Those of you who were old enough. Something got a couple of deer, back in 2004.” Laura felt Perry twitch convulsively next to her. “We never found out what.”

Vordenberg sighed. “Yes.” He walked around the gathered circle of villagers, apparently thinking. Perry trembled as he came near and although he made sure not to do anything so obvious as to stop, he looked very closely into her eyes while passing before giving a short, almost imperceptible, nod to whatever her expression told. “But that was a long time ago. I do not think that who, ah, whatever was responsible for that regrettable incident can be dredged up now.” Theo looked defiant, but dropped his gaze as Vordenberg insisted. “I say so.”

“Be that as it may,” Theo said, and his tone of voice made quite clear he was addressing the village now and not Vordenberg alone, “we must – _surely_ \- ask ourselves what has happened recently. We all know that sometimes people do odd things around here. Mr Hotckiss! Your daughter went up to Carn’s Cairn last summer, didn’t she? Said something about seeing a ghost? Broke her leg as I recall.” Mr Hotckiss shuffled his feet and nodded grudging agreement.

“And Caroline,” who turned out to be the blond girl who had been sick over the churchyard wall, “your cousin came to stay a few years back? The pretty one - went out stargazing on the moors and came back screaming.”

Theo pulled away from Vordenberg’s restraining hand to march through the crowd, arm held high with clenched fist as he reeled off those incidents he could remember. Laura watched people's expressions and could see the idea of the witch returned growing ever firmer in their minds.

“And all about the moor,” Theo concluded. “All up by way of Carn’s Cairn. If somebody has either started behaving oddly or – perhaps – is newly arrived,” and he quite openly crossed the circle to stand in front of Laura, “If somebody has been spending a lot of time up there, well…” he trailed off and said no more. 

“Saw her collecting something the other day,” commented one of the increasing chorus of uncertain voices.

Laura tried to look back calmly despite her hammering heart and dry mouth. There were faces looking at her now, with curiosity as to what Theo might have seen, but she knew he wouldn’t say anything about magical protection against groping or dreams of straw dolls. If he made an open accusation it could be argued against. An insinuation would begin the cycle of rumour. 

Somebody was muttering, “-dyke from what I heard. Might be normal in London, but down here-”

“Way uncool, bro!” objected another – Kirsch, she thought.

Perry's hand caught hold of Laura's wrist tightly, but the conversation was breaking down as different people began pointing out the various suspicious activities of whichever of their neighbours they liked least. Laura was not the only person to to be under scrutiny, it seemed.

“Remember what they used to say about Perry, though-”

“That Scott girl, she's always-”

“Come on, there's only one witchcraft expert here and it's Armitage-”

“Mrs MacGinty's been 'feeling unwell' this past week. Ain't seen her cat either-”

“Look, I don't know _what_ Belmonde is but she's just not right, you know what I mean-”

“I will not,” shouted Vordenberg as loudly as he could, “have a panicked disorder in _my_ village.” A few people shuffled their feet. He took a shaky breath. “Ladies and gentlemen, we will have calm. The witch of centuries past is long dead, slain by the great Baron Vordenberg. This latest disturbance is a mere, a mere ripple in the calm surface of our village. Everyone just be normal. Be normal.”

“We will put a watch out and there will be no further action, do I make myself understood? Straka, since you are so keen to get to the bottom of this, you may have the honour of organizing it. For now, get this stuff cleaned up. Everyone else, I take it you have jobs to go to?” There was much slow beginning to drift away.

Perry took hold of Laura’s arm and steered her briskly in the direction of the Brinded Cat. “Breakfast,” she said firmly, and pursed her lips. “If you’re still hungry after all that. I know I wasn’t.”

The past tense caught Laura in the whirlwind of her thoughts and she couldn’t hold back the question. “You weren’t when?” she asked, and a pair of statements from two different speakers joined up in her mind. “Twelve years ago, maybe?”

Perry almost stumbled in the street, but this only made her drag Laura into the pub faster. “What do you mean 'twelve years ago'?” she demanded.

“I heard Vordenberg talking to you yesterday,” Laura said. “An 'upsetting summer twelve years ago', he said. And just now Theo talked about 2004. What happened that year? I know there was something. And,” she added, staring intently at Perry’s closed eyes, “I think you know why I need to be told.” Perry closed the door firmly behind her and put her weight on it as she breathed out slowly. 

Finally she opened her eyes. “That was the summer I dreamed of Carmilla,” she said.

* * *

Her story came out in fits and tangles. Perry hesitated a lot, and fluttered her hands, and shied away from details until Laura pressed her. But it came out piece by piece. Laura made the required pots of tea silently, interrupting as little as possible.

Perry was eighteen and had just finished school for good. She had lived and studied in Plymouth but she was now moving to Burnt Tawton to work at her grandmother’s pub. One day it would be hers. A long hot summer, the strange liminal overlap period between childhood and adulthood – but a bit lonely. Her schoolfriend JP was from the village himself, but he was preparing to go to Oxford and wanted to attend a summer crammer near Exeter to make up for things not taught at their secondary modern school. 

Perry, eighteen years old: she wore her hair right down her back and only reluctantly pinned it up when baking. Bright, floral clothes; spangly jewellery with zodiacal motifs; a consuming interest in witchery and the supernatural. And not much to do in her spare time except go walking on the moors. 

She played witch at first, trying unsuccessfully to do spells out of books and catch a glimpse of the fairy folk around Shadwell Spring. And of course she listened to the local story. The old Mr Vordenberg – Ignatius Vordenberg, father of the current Cornelius – used to tell it to bored audiences at the Midsummer Fair, slurring his way through the cider. It was transparent nonsense to her teenaged self. The crude, resentful villagers had clearly just nursed a grudge against the mystical, free-spirited Miss Karnstein. The figure of Carmilla came to stand for everything she wanted to be.

And then the dreams started. Gentle at first, but then intensifying rapidly as Perry threw herself into the world they laid open. Carmilla showed her a way to move unseen through the woods – not quite invisible, but unnoticed if she wanted to be even by people a few feet away. For the first time she was doing spells and they worked. Young Perry flowered in the excitement. No longer shy, she wore openly her crafty regalia and stopped bothering to carefully avoid pronouns when referring to romantic hopes. She even – Perry told Laura with a blush – openly kissed Sarah-Jane in the pub one day and didn’t care who stared.

A couple of nights after this exciting incident, Ignatius Vordenberg paid one of his rare visits to the pub. Perry was on the bar that night as she increasingly was most nights, her grandmother being more and more willing to hand over the reins. Vordenberg appropriated the armchair in front of the fire, called for a large brandy, and started holding forth to anyone who would listen on the loose morals of the younger generation. Various dark hints left no room for doubt.

_In the good old days_ \- his jowly face bellowed - _women who were unnatural were taught the error of their ways._

Perry didn’t throw anything at him. She finished the evening with a tense smile on her face and went out into the garden for a little walk before bed, returning with a handful of straw. The next day news got out that Ignatius Vordenberg was sick with a raging fever. Apparently he raved in his sleep about witches and straw dolls. His son Cornelius was summoned from his business interests in London.

Taken aback by her success Perry felt uncertain about next steps, but a night of drawn-out pleasure with Carmilla drove doubts from her mind. She followed the promptings and, inevitably, brewed for herself an ointment. Her cookery skills and free access to a kitchen made it simpler than for Laura, but the result was the same. 

“What happened then?” asked Laura when the silence had gone on for long enough. There was a minute or so of clinking cup and saucer together as her landlady tried to find the words.

Perry didn't know, exactly. She had short, fragmented memories – Laura could guess what kind – but the end results were amenable enough to reconstruction. Cornelius Vordenberg arrived at the village late at night after a long drive when... _something_ came out of the wood and pursued him to his door. In the morning, two horribly mutilated deer were discovered alongside the road - and Ignatius Vordenberg was dead. The fever would have been shaken off by a young man, but he was old and unhealthy and his heart gave out.

Perry had woken up with blood in her mouth and the news of death. Bereaved Cornelius told the story of a black fanged shape chasing him, and she realised how close she had been to killing a second human victim. Looking at the remains of the deer, little imagination was needed to see what might have become of Vordenberg junior.

There were tears in Perry's eyes as she reached her tale's climax. Laura sat in stony shock for some minutes before she finally she got up the courage to ask how it ended.

“I spent about a week not seeing anyone,” Perry said. “Gave out that I'd caught a sickness myself. After the funeral Vordenberg came to see me. He didn't press me on anything, but I could tell he suspected a lot, though I don't know how accurately.”

“I don't think there was much love between him and his father. They'd never been close and I suppose he just wanted the whole thing tidied away as quickly as possible. So he said to me – very carefully – that it was so _upsetting_ for these things to have happened and wouldn't it be _nice_ if the village could just be normal. Be normal.” She hugged herself and nodded firmly.

“I said I agreed. I said I hoped we'd never see the animals which attacked him again, and he looked like he got the meaning. Even made a point of saying that his time in London had taught him not to share his father's prejudices – but that most of all it had made him want a quiet life. No disturbances in his village.”

“ _His_ village,” muttered Laura sourly, and Perry made a wry face in agreement.

“Since then he's been... strict, I suppose, but not so bad. Every so often someone suggests using the old story as a tourist lure and he forbids it. The only thing allowed is his ancestor's stupid plaque and whenever someone mentions Carmilla or so much as goes near the Firestone, he always puts in that good old Baron Vordenberg burned her. Just in case anyone gets any ideas.”

“And the dreams?”

Perry fiddled with the hem of her blouse. “I had them for a bit afterwards, but shut her out as best I could. They started fading and by Hallowe'en they were gone. JP came back at Christmas after his first term and that was the beginning of me being normal. He doesn't know,” she added hurridly.

Laura took it all in. Given the speed she remembered in a fragmented way from the previous night, Perry had indeed been lucky not to have Vordenberg's blood on her hands. Or mouth.

“Why?” she asked eventually. “Why do the dreams happen?”

Perry shrugged. “I asked my grandmother that, the following Christmas. It all came out at last, and she told me what _her_ grandmother had told her about the witches.”

“Witches?” asked Laura, catching the plural.

“Yes. Carmilla – and Ell. Carmilla was from the village, but Ell wasn't. Nobody knew where Ell lived exactly – one of the other villages, probably, or in some isolated cottage on her own. But the two girls became fast friends. Going everywhere together. Well, things started to happen: valuable items went missing, livestock was killed, the girls were spotted doing odd things with herbs. Some said they were lovers – you can imagine how that went down in 1698.

“They decided to flee. Carmilla arranged to meet Ell at the Cairn one night in late summer, but she never came. Instead, the villagers turned up. Baron Vordenberg said she should be killed but Count Karnstein, her father, said she'd been led astray and would recover. The Count prevailed and Carmilla was locked in her room, still screaming for Ell to come with her.

“But the Baron wasn't taking any chances. He led a mob of people around that night and they threw burning torches into Karnstein's house. The whole family was killed.”

“No room for disagreement in _his_ village,” said Laura.

“Yes. Elle was never seen again: but then nobody knew where she came from anyway. I suppose that's where the different stories stemmed from. Some people remembered that Ell was still out there and they said that 'the witch' haunted the moors. Others remembered that the witch had been burned and after a while the Vordenbergs proposed a more glamorous tale.”

“So,” repeated Laura when the account had settled in. “Why _do_ the dreams happen?”

“I think they're an echo,” said Perry. “They're not real. The best we can do is not to listen to them.”

“An _echo_?” cried Laura. “Perry, we transformed into... things! And killed! With Carmilla next to us!” But Perry was shaking her head.

“No. Not with Carmilla next to us. When Vordenberg told everyone about being chased, he was very clear: one animal. It was you, and only you, Laura. And before that, me and only me.” She met her eyes waveringly. “Laura, have you found any trace of Carmilla in your bed? Hmm? Hairs, even the imprint of her body? Thought not. Have you dreamt her in modern clothes? Thought so. So how can she be any more than your dream?

“Explain how we've both seen her! And there must have been others, mustn't there? All the girls doing odd things on the moor now and again. All picking up the same kind of experience, almost like we've overhearing something together.”

Laura revolted against the explanation. “She taught me-”

“You saw, and you learned. And with the knowledge you did everything yourself.” Perry folded her hands in her lap and stared down at them.

“Our initials on a stone-” offered Laura.

“Not names, I'll bet. Could be anyone's, couldn't they? And are you sure you didn't see them before you dreamt them?”

“Well I did, but-”

“Give it up, Laura. It was in another time and besides, the witch is dead.”

* * *

She lay in bed, letting the ceiling rock under the influence of all the wine. Perry had frowned at the fourth glass but said nothing. Just before last orders Theo wandered in, primed for his first night as watchman. He carried his rifle slung ostentatiously over his back and asked for his hip flask to be filled. Someone clapped him on the back as he left smirking, and there was a general buzzing of approval. Laura avoided his smug eyes.

She drifted into incoherent drunken dreams. Carmilla was there, fluttering against the edge of her consciousness like a moth against glass, but Laura pushed her away.

“How do I know you're real?” she pleaded. “How do I know what you want?”

“You know,” said Carmilla's low, purring voice.

“I don't! I don't know who or what you are, really! I don't know what you want with me. I want answers!”

But Carmilla only laughed. “No you don't, sweetheart. You want me.”


	8. Laura

It was almost afternoon when Laura woke, but she didn’t have the will to get out of bed for some time afterwards. She finished off the last mystery borrowed from the library and when Inspector Morse had had his revelation following on from a difficult crossword clue (Lewis had inadvertently suggested looking at things out of order), she stacked it with the Agatha Christies to be taken back later.

Perry came in at lunchtime with a delayed breakfast on a tray. She put her hand on Laura’s forehead, made a sympathetically encouraging face, and then left without saying anything. Laura ate her bubble-and-squeak and drank her tea without relish.

The cuts and grazes on her legs looked better in the shower than they had yesterday, and the aches were fading. She traced her wrist and felt nothing on the skin, not even the slightest hint of chafing.

“I'll be going tomorrow,” she told Perry on her way outside. Perry nodded, unsurprised, and then startled Laura by unbalancing her in a hug.

“Look after yourself,” she said. “Make sure you have people around you. You've got your flatmate – Betty? That's good.”

“Keep yourself well too,” Laura told her, touched by the concern. “You've got JP, of course. And you've got Mattie too now.” When Perry's expression assumed a combination of blushing and puzzled denial, she added, “Even if you don't know it yet. Actually – do me a favour?”

“Of course-”

“Some time soon, find an excuse to drop in on Mattie. One day you're not busy. Just... put yourself in her way. You'll thank me later,” and Laura was pleasantly surprised to find that she could still laugh.

There was a woman weeding her front garden when Laura crossed the village with an armful of books. She looked at Laura suspiciously, then darted her gaze away when she saw that her watching had been noticed. All the mess from yesterday had been well cleaned up from the road and there was nothing about the village in sunshine to suggest anything under the surface. She half-turned in the middle of her walk to watch a flight of swallows loop their way from the bridge to the pub.

Her thoughts started spreading out of the village for the first time in days. She would be in London for dinner tomorrow and tell Betty everything. Betty would assume she'd been ill and hallucinated most of it. She'd apologise to Danny, and that would at least allow them to go their separate ways in peace. She'd study something – folklore, maybe, or history - in her spare time, and that would keep her work from consuming her. She had years of pop culture to catch up on, too.

How long would it take Perry to follow her suggestion and go see Mattie? she wondered. How she would have liked to be a fly on that wall.

JP was in his accustomed position in the library office, lounging behind his desk with the supernatural tales of Algernon Blackwood. He flowed to his feet and put the kettle on before she made it to her armchair.

“Anything stronger?” she asked by way of greeting. He looked at her for a long while, but nodded and retrieved a dusty pair of glasses and a bottle of Scotch from their former post as bookends on a shelf. The kettle boiled and clicked off unattended.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“I’m leaving. Tomorrow.” She nodded to the stack of books she’d brought with her. “Came to bring these back.”

“They’ve rattled you, haven’t they? These killings?” He looked into his glass. “Or Theo has, anyway.”

She couldn’t tell him any more than that. “Yeah. I suppose so. Breaks the idyll a bit.”

“I’m sorry about that. What will you do?”

She shrugged. “I’ve still got a couple of weeks before I’m allowed back at work. Guess I’ll go home. Betty will be wondering why I haven’t texted. Perhaps I’ll sit on the sofa and watch boxed sets for a fortnight.”

JP smiled. “There are worse coping mechanisms. Speaking of which, a suggestion for tonight.” He ducked under his desk and came up with a shoebox. “Doctor Who. _All_ of Doctor Who. You used to be really into it, right?” Laura nodded. “Take it with you when you go, and sink into it.”

“I couldn’t-”

“-and bring it back when you’re finished and are happily recovered,” he concluded. That managed to bring a smile to her face. “Going back to the sources. A good way to start afresh.”

“That sounds really good.” It did. It came to her that maybe she could come back, if the dreams could be suppressed after a while. This wasn't a bad place, even without exciting sexy witches to pursue.

JP clapped his hands. “Splendid! Now: which Doctor is your favourite?”

The conversation started slowly, but as the comparisons and reminiscences started flowing, Laura began to feel better. Stories came back to her under JP's prompting, characters she hadn't thought of for years raised their heads. All the monsters and plots and mysteries and paradoxes that she'd forgotten she loved.

“The paradoxes are my favourite,” JP was saying. “You can keep thinking about them, going round and round and never stop.”

“But you don't get anywhere,” said Laura. “I like the mysteries when they solve something. But,” she added quickly to avoid killing the conversation, “what kind of paradox? What's your favourite?”

“Bootstrap!” he said after a think. “Like, somebody gives you a key. You unlock a door, go through it to the past and after a while you meet your former self – and give them the key.”

Laura searched her memory. “Or like the conversation in _Blink_.” He grinned and nodded, and she continued. “Actually yeah, there are some great ones like that. Or when Rose goes back to see her father before he dies and tries to change the past, but ends up... well, it makes me cry, but kind of in a good way.”

JP didn't ask the question, and she was grateful for the chance to lighten the subject. “What would you change? In the past?”

He put on a serious face. “Some of my teenage dress sense,” he confessed.

“Who wouldn't? Hey – didn't you say you were a bit of a metalhead?”

He waggled his hand non-committally. “Well, insofar as one can be living in a provincial village with a vicar for a father. I think I've got a picture somewhere, actually.” He dug a box file out of a cabinet and came out with a sheaf of cardboard photo frames. “There.”

It was a school photograph: _Class of 2004_ , it read in bold letters at the bottom. There was the normal assortment of school leavers looking relieved and bored with the final ritual before freedom. They wore their own clothes for the last day of class. She spotted JP towards the back after a short search and coughed out a disbelieving laugh. Studded leather jacket, long greasy hair, Iron Maiden T-shirt.

“It's Perry too,” Laura realised. She was standing next to him, beaming in loose patterned purple with a wreath of flowers on her head. There was a suggestion at a distance of dangly earrings.

“Yes, indeed. What a pair we make! One day when we're famous, biographers will discover this and excitedly work across the names to see what their idols looked like,” he bantered.

“No doubt they-” Laura trailed off as something obvious occurred to her. “Hang on,” she said. “It's so stupid, in well over a week I've not asked. What _does_ JP stand for?” 

He flicked his eyes heavenwards in a theatrical prayer, and she ran her finger along the list of names. It wasn't in alphabetical order, everyone having demanded to be photographed next to their friends, but in the second row from the top-

“...really?” she asked, a grin growing huge on her face. “ _Really?_ ” JP sat shamefaced before her discovery. “If my name was _Jeremiah Prendergast Armitage_ , I'd keep it! You wouldn't here me introducing myself as L- oh my God.” A shock went through her, like the moments when someone is right behind you and the hairs stand up on your neck.

“What? What's the matter?” He leaned forward, concern in his pale eyes.

“L. _Ell_. Not Ell at all. _L_.”

“Laura? I'm afraid to say you're not making a huge amount of sense.”

The cogs fit into place and started ticking. She giggled at his baffled expression. “No, you wouldn't. Because I'm saying it out loud. Perry told me a story last night, something her grandmother told her. Only it had never been written down, you see? So she thought it was a name: Ell. But what if it was a letter: L?”

This failed to clear up his expression, but she was too excited to pause and backtrack. She was on her feet in moments and pacing as the thoughts jostled each other to take form first. She made it three paces before diving back to grab the photograph again and look for another name, which made her squeal with joy.

“ _Lola Perry_. Yes! I remember! She had it up on the website! I'm so stupid, everyone calls her by her surname so I completely forgot.” She slapped her thigh. “The girl. JP – the girl who went up on the moor last year looking for ghosts and broke her leg. What was her name?”

He flicked his eyes up and thought. “Um... Lily. Lily Hotchkiss.”

Laura clapped her hands. “ _Lily!_ Two Ls is a coincidence, but three: three is a conspiracy! But then why in the first place?” Pacing up to the wall, turn, back down again to JP who had stood up-

“Our initials. She carved our initials on a stone. L+C. Perry was right, they could belong to anyone. Or at least, anyone with the right initial...”

It was coming fast, too fast to be consolidated. She leapt on the forming ideas like stepping stones.

“She never used my name,” Laura breathed. “Never. Always sweetie, or sweetheart. Cupcake. Creampuff. Cutie.” Fingers snapped three times in quick succession. “JP. Spells. To cast a spell on someone, what do you do?”

The question flung him a lifeline in his floundering to understand the bizarre development in their conversation. “Erm... usually something of theirs. Hair or nails is classical. Old clothes, sometimes. Or you can just have them with you in some forms. But at any rate, one must have a name for-” he broke off as Laura enfolded him in a hug.

“She doesn't know my name!” she crowed. “She doesn't know L's name! It's dreams, you see? Perry said it was all a dream, but she missed the point. Carmilla's dreaming as well.”

“Carmilla?” asked JP, dropping back into his chair and looking completely lost. “Carmilla Karnstein?”

“Yes! Oh JP, I'm sorry but I don't have time to explain anything. I've got to go!” And she threw herself into a hug once more before running out of the library and all the way back to the pub.

She almost bowled an innocent woman over on the way, but Laura couldn't even stop to apologise. The pub door seemed to take an age to swing open as she pushed in and tumbled into the kitchen to find Perry. 

“Nobody knew where Ell came from,” she said by way of greeting.

“Laura?” Perry immediately dropped her bowl of cake mix and took hold of her shoulders.

“Nobody knew,” repeated Laura. “That's right, isn't it?”

“Are you all right-”

“Perry, I'm fine. Just listen and nod. Nobody knew where Ell came from, you said. Yes, good. But you didn't say: _not even Carmilla_.” She gulped air. “And then Ell didn't turn up, and she was locked away, still calling for her. That's a nod, right? Right.”

Laura stood back from Perry's terrified face and leant on the work surface. The initial rush was over and the implications were sinking in. “And she's still calling.”

Perry sighed and her forehead under the bandanna she wore when baking wrinkled in worry. “Laura, you need to stop this. Remember? Carmilla's dead.” She took hold of Laura's fluttering hands and pressed them together. “You can't change what's past, and even if you could it's got nothing to do with you.”

“But what if it has, Perry? What if Carmilla's story isn't about what happened _then?_ What if it's about what I do _next?_ ”

* * *

On the stack of paper in front of her was a great pile of scribblings, many of them crossed out, and then rewritten, and then crossed out again. She had drawn diagrams and then furiously criticised the arrogance of the attempt. The more recent the pages, the less was written. Long paragraphs of explanation gave way to short segments connected by arrows, and then to fragments pointing to each other in spidery messes. Finally there was a page on which she had written nothing at all except a name.

Crap. She crumpled up the note and threw it in the fireplace. One struck match and it was gone. In place of it, she drew a new sheet of paper and wrote three brief lines saying all that could be said. The church clock heaved its way towards midnight.

The night outside was agitated. Somewhere on the road was Theo Straka, staking out a second vigil with his gun and fiddling with the cap of his hip flask. In the other bedroom of the pub, Lola Perry turned fitfully in her sleep, feeling the tug of a disembodied voice far away and a beautiful woman not so far away. In his little cottage hidden away at the back of the village, JP leafed through an old volume and tried for the thousandth time to put an inkling to bed. There were charred ruins under his floor that he would never see but which would have answered some of his questions.

Matska Belmonde put down the phone and seethed at the idiocy of the Secretary of State. Cornelius Vordenberg slept deep and satisfied in a leather armchair, letting the wine and roast beef do the dreaming for him. Six feet to the left and three centuries earlier, the old Baron Vordenberg stood on a table and gathered his men together.

Carmilla Karnstein ransacked her bedroom, digging up pots of ointment and strange oddities from their secret hiding places. They had barred the door from the outside, but she had locked it from the inside too. On the wood panelling of her bedroom she had scrawled the letters _L+C_ with a burnt stick from the fire. She had opened the window in preparation and from outside she could hear the growing clamour of a mob marching towards the house, but she wasn't scared. She had time, and help would come.

Laura Hollis stood in the gyre of past and present, understanding at last that there were questions she was the answer to, others whose echoes she must expand to contain. Circular as her way was, it led not only back to that fire-haunted past, but out onto the starry moor where her coming was awaited.

* * *

The end of the witch hunt cannot be narrated with any degree of stability, since it ends as it began with one foot in the world of dreams and the other in the past – which is to say in another kind of dream. The publicly acknowledged facts of the case are these:

That on the night of the 21st August 2016, Laura Hollis disappeared from her bedroom on the upper floor of the _Brinded Cat_ at Burnt Tawton, leaving behind all of her clothes and other possessions but without writing any note that came to the attention of the authorities.

That on this same night a local man, Theo Straka, who had been mounting an armed vigil to determine the culprit of some recent killings of local livestock, was found with his throat torn out and what appeared to be smudged and bloody animal prints on the road around him. Police forensics hesitantly advanced the possibility of there having been two animals, judging from the size of the prints.

That the death of Straka was discovered by three village residents - all women – who had come out onto the street in the small hours because they were agitated by bad dreams. Lola Perry, owner of the _Brinded Cat_ , said “I thought at first I heard somebody call me. But thinking about it now, I'm not sure it was my name after all.” 

With so few facts to hand, the locals were forced to resort to telling varying and contradictory stories to make sense of the confusion of events - which of course is to say no more than that it passed into the telling of history.

* * *

_Dear Perry and JP (only),_

_The fact of the case is simply this: my love and I have gone a-hunting._

_L._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I hope that cleared everything up.
> 
> This is probably the most ambitious fic I've so far attempted in terms of plot and characters, and certainly the longest. Thanks to all of you who have read, and especially to those of you who provided kudos and comments. Special thanks to [rubyroth](http://archiveofourown.org/users/rubyroth/pseuds/rubyroth), [imonlyheresoIdontgetfined](http://archiveofourown.org/users/imonlyheresoIdontgetfined/pseuds/imonlyheresoIdontgetfined) and [vampire_chunks](http://archiveofourown.org/users/vampire_chunks/pseuds/vampire_chunks) who gave truly lovely messages of encouragement that got me through the difficult middle chapters.
> 
> Readers who want more Hollstein supernatural mysteries might enjoy [The Original of Laura](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6249664/chapters/14319124), in which there are two Lauras, as a bonus.
> 
> Readers who like the idea of smutty gothic dreams might enjoy my collection of Permonde fairy tales, [All The Better to Eat You With](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5349530/chapters/12353057).


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